The latest  OpenEmbedded distribution (July 2008) ships with a very outdated *bb file for GDAL (1.3.2). The usual approach of simply re-naming the file to a more up-to-date version will fail as GDAL's compilation process has been standardized to the common compilation rules. Thus all the workarounds of the old *bb file are finally void.

For a very minimalistic compilation of GDAL for mobile devices you can use this *bb file (gdal_1.5.2.bb):

DESCRIPTION = "GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats"
HOMEPAGE = "http://www.gdal.org/"
LICENSE = "MIT"
DEPENDS = "zlib"

SRC_URI = "http://www.gdal.org/dl/${P}.tar.gz"

inherit autotools pkgconfig binconfig

#PARALLEL_MAKE = ""

EXTRA_OECONF = "--without-perl \
                --without-python \
                --without-php \
                --without-ruby \
                --without-curl \
                --with-libz=internal \
                --with-png=internal \
                --with-jpeg=internal \
                --with-libtiff=internal \
                --without-expat \
                "
FILES_${PN} = "\
${bindir}/ \
${libdir}/ \
${datadir}/ \
"

do_stage() {
        autotools_stage_all
}

The file has to go into "./org.openembedded.dev/packages/gdal". To compile GDAL you do a

bitbake gdal

in your local build path.

The very same *bb file has been reported as fix to the OpenEmbedded bug tracking system. However bug processing is slow for OpenEmbedded and geo-spatial toolkits aren't on the top priority list. Thus best practice is to check first if the changes are applied already.