Hasta La Gadget!

Now that we have clarity with regard to a Windows Phone 7 update on the HD2 (sorry, folks), let’s move on to the next contentious platform: Nokia’s N900 and MeeGo. As Nokia’s only Cortex-A8 handset, there’s plenty of hope that Nokia sees fit to upgrade the N900 to MeeGo once the unified Maemo and Moblin OS is ready for consumers. Hope all but crushed yesterday after CNET reported the following from an unnamed, but apparently official Nokia source:

“Maemo on Nokia N900 is not upgradeable to MeeGo.”

We ran this past Ray Haddow, Senior Manager within Nokia Communications who took the quote back to the project team in Finland. According to Ray, the “the door is not closed” with regard to MeeGo on the N900 — a final decision has not been made. This also echos the words of Valtteri Halla when he announced the MeeGo repository in early March. In response to questions at the time, this one-bodied half of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group had this to day:

“N900 is a natural tool for Nokia to drive MeeGo support for our designs and for the ARM CPU architecture in general. We want to have baseline HW that is powerful, easily available for anyone and form-factor stuff so that one HW works for most platform and application development needs.

That said, please do not take this yet as a commitment to fully productise MeeGo on N900. I am quite confident that we will end up having a really good developer distro for N900 already but committing to stabilise a consumer-grade MeeGo 1.0 (first half this year) for N900 is another story. That is a product business decision beyond my scope. Also, we do not yet know about MeeGo 1 release content. I am not yet sure if I would be personally ready to let my Maemo5 go for the first MeeGo release in my daily N900 use. Let’s see.”

So, looks like another long game of wait and see, eh?

Nokia: MeeGo “door is not closed” on N900 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Valtteri Halla — Nokia employee and one-half of MeeGo’s Technical Steering Group — has blogged up a storm this week about the first baby steps that’ll get the platform off the ground from its Moblin and Maemo roots, and from the sounds of things, we’ll be able to get our first glimpse at it on production hardware before the month’s out. Currently, the plan is to open up MeeGo’s code repository to all comers “by the end of this month,” targeting both Atom boards and the N900. Now, we certainly wouldn’t say that MeeGo’s decision to use the N900 as an early target device is indicative of an official upgrade down the line — but this is particularly interesting in light of the fact that we’ve never gotten a commitment out of Nokia to bump its latest MID to Maemo 6. And besides, considering that the average N900 customer is a bit of a hacker in his or her own right, let’s be honest: a code repository that supports the phone is just about as good as an official gold build anyhow.

MeeGo repository going public later this month, coming to Nokia N900 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel and Nokia certainly surprised a few of us yesterday when they decided to merge Moblin and Maemo into the new, more terribly-named MeeGo OS, but it looks like LG is ready to roll with it — the Moorestown-powered LG GW990 we saw at CES will be one of the first MeeGo phones when it launches later this year. Of course, that doesn’t mean much of anything beyond branding, since the GW990 uses a custom UI on top of the x86-based Moblin core and we doubt there’s any of Maemo’s ARM-based code involved there, but it’s a definite sign of things to come. So, Nokia — are we going to see a Moorestown N900, or what?

LG GW990 to be among first MeeGo phones originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well this one is a… doozy? Today Nokia announced a rather bizarre partnership with Intel. Namely, the two companies are merging their odd, half-finished, Linux-based OSs into one crazy little package called… MeeGo. No, really. Intel is mixing its peanut butter Moblin with Nokia’s chocolatey Maemo to create a “software platform that will support multiple hardware architectures across the broadest range of device segments, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.” That broad enough for you? According to the company’s press release, the new platform will begin baring fruit (AKA devices) later this year, though the specific types of devices weren’t touched upon. Nokia’s CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo claims that the union will “create an ecosystem that is second to none” through openness, though at this point it’s largely bluster. Why the two monoliths have decided to pair up on these decidedly niche platforms rather than focusing energies on their front and center products is anyone’s guess, but luckily you can attempt to decipher more detail in the PR, included for your convenience after the break!

Continue reading MeeGo: Nokia and Intel merge Maemo and Moblin

MeeGo: Nokia and Intel merge Maemo and Moblin originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 05:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading N900 gains PS3 Sixaxis control over SNES gaming (video)

N900 gains PS3 Sixaxis control over SNES gaming (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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