Intel and Nokia have scrapped their stand-alone Maemo and Moblin operating systems and merged them into a single open-source OS named MeeGo.
MWC 2010, Barcelona | Intel and Nokia are joining forces to take the high ground in the ‘smartbook’ market, as well as a new breed of mobile internet devices, with a single open-source OS dubbed MeeGo.
The Linux-based OS will replace each company’s respective mobile operating systems – Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo – with an initial MeeGo 1.0 release due by mid-year (the OS site is already live at
meego.com)
“Maemo and Moblin will merge into MeeGo to create a complete computing and communications experience” said Nokia mobile phones supremo Kai Oistamo.
MeeGo is intended to power a wide range of devices including “netbooks, 3G smartbooks, tablets and slates, media phones, connected TVs and mobile entertainment systems”, said Intel software Renee James, Intel’s senior veep for software and services.
On the smartbook front, Oistamo cited the forthcoming Nokia N900, shown below – which will be launched to the Australian tech media on March 2nd – as “the direction we see for the MeeGo platform on Nokia devices”.
James says that MeeGo will not only “help minimise the fragmentation in mobile Linux operating systems”, which will in turn be good news for app developers.
MeeGo will also run across multiple architectures, including Intel’s x86 chips and Nokia’s ARM processors. Intel’s AppUp store will be the outlet for MeeGo apps running on Intel hardware, with Nokia’s Ovi Store will serve up software to Nokia’s devices,
Not only will there be a single platform to write for, but the wider range of MeeGo devices will expand opportunities for developers by offering “a single unified footprint across a large range of devices.”
In turn, it’s hoped that users will prove loyal to the MeeGo platform as they buy new devices because they will be able to run their existing MeeGo applications across those devices.
“We see the MeeGo ecosystem as an open frontier, not being locked into one device” Oistamo said.
However, Oistamo was quick to note that MeeGo and Symbian would co-exist. “Symbian is the perfect environment for democratising smartphones and bringing the smartphone experience to the masses”, compared to MeeGo as a platform for “a new class of devices and usages’.
David Flynn is attending Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona as a guest of Samsung.