Nokia is betting heavily on the MeeGo operating system, which was developed for use in smartphones, tablet devices, and other touch-enabled environments. Intel and Nokia have made the pre-alpha code available for developers to begin building on.
The successor to Symbian hopes to attract platform developers, handset vendors, and operators to contribute to MeeGo 1.1, which is expected to roll out later this year.
But can the Linux-based operating system complete in an iPhone-Android world? Nokia is bold enough to think so.
“We believe the trajectory for innovation can be higher for MeeGo than for Android,” Tom Miller, head of MeeGo ecosystem development at Nokia, told listeners at a presentation during Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference in San Diego Wednesday. “Watch this space.”
A Bid for Developers
In an IT marketplace obsessed with consumer gizmos, serious developer news tends to disappear beneath continuing waves of product launches and promotions, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. Yet without developers working and sweating behind the scenes, he added, techno-gimcracks have the inherent value of badly designed doorstops.
“Bottom line: Without the involvement of interested and enthusiastic developers, innovation is DOA,” King said. “So it behooves vendors to make it as easy as possible for developers to be creative, which is where MeeGo comes in.”
The MeeGo concept was birthed about a year ago when Intel and Nokia decided to work together on mobile-computing initiatives. Essentially, MeeGo merges Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo operating environments for use in both Intel Atom and ARM processor-based devices.
King said the effort wasn’t simply a matter of two large vendors paling around — both Intel and Nokia are looking to better position themselves to address burgeoning demand for mobile devices ranging from increasingly powerful smartphones to rapidly evolving tablets.
A MeeGo Must
Nokia has to make a move. Although it’s still officially the world’s…