Kshitij Sobti

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Posted on 01-07-2010

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It was about a year ago that Nokia and Intel announced plans for a partnership centered around their respective Linux platforms, and a couple of months ago, they unveiled MeeGo, a successor to both Intel’s Moblin Linux and Nokia’s Maemo.

• Nokia reveals its own MeeGo user interface for its future...
• MeeGo 1.1 released - dual-boot for Nokia N900 and beta SDK...
• Nokia N9, the fusion tablet phone, is showed off in a introductory...

Yesterday, MeeGo saw the first release of a handset version of the OS, which unlike the previous developer release features a proper UI. This release will also work on the Nokia N900 mobile phone as well as Intel’s own Aava Mobile platform based on Moorsetown.

MeeGo Handset Home	MeeGo Handset dialer

Previously they had released a version 1.0 of their OS for Netbooks, which was very similar in it’s interface and interaction design to Intel’s own Moblin OS, it was in essence Moblin 3.0 rebranded. The same may be said of the current MeeGo release for handsets. It represents what would have been Maemo 6 – of course the final version we will see on Nokia’s future devices will more evolved and feature Nokia branding and applications.

Symbian has been struggling to keep up with the other platforms, and even the Symbain^3 in an exhaustive review of the OS by Mobile Review only seemed to be playing catch up. But in MeeGo lies a new hope. If Nokia does drop Symbian from its higher end N-series devices – as they supposedly are – Nokia might have better luck with its smartphones with a more capable OS.

The plans for MeeGo don’t end here. With MeeGo Intel and Nokia plan to increase the scope of their merged Linux distribution from Netbooks (for Intel’s Moblin), and Smartphones/Internet Tablets (for Nokia’s Maemo) to five categories of devices: Netbooks, Handsets, Media Players, In-Vehicle Infotainment systems, and Televisions. On the other hand Android too is growing and has been demonstrated in all kinds devices, from netbooks, numerous handsets, tablets, cars, media players, and of course, TVs with Google’s own Google TV. MeeGo has a lot of competition ahead to face.

While all four of these operating systems (Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo and Android) are Linux based, and all of them do their own thing UI-wise, Android shares very little with the Linux paradigm compared to Intel and Nokia’s OSs. On MeeGo, like on Maemo and Moblin, it is possible to install standard Linux applications written in their native languages. Android on the other hand uses a completely different paradigm where applications written in Java run on the Dalvik VM. Android does allow for applications to contain native code components, however writing an application purely in native code isn’t possible. This means that the large number of applications available for Linux will require quite a bit of refactoring in order to be ported to Android.

While one may feel like declaring a winner, and the “death” of the other platform, the best thing for consumers is choice. We now have the luxury of choices for PC operating systems, and as these devices get more powerful and more featured, we may see a future where the choice of a mobile device will be uncoupled from that of a mobile OS.

Click next for more images of the MeeGo interface, and a video