Updated to include Intel’s comments about current MeeGo devices
It hasn’t been smooth sailing for MeeGo, Intel and Nokia’s combined effort to develop a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. A key executive departure and news that smartphones running the operating system won’t be available until sometime next year has left Intel and Nokia fighting to stay on course.
“The community around MeeGo is very strong,” Suzy Ramirez, an Intel spokesperson told Wired.com. “We are on schedule and MeeGo will be available for TVs and in-car entertainment systems soon, and other devices next year.”
MeeGo has had a tough week. On Tuesday, Ari Jaaksi, the vice-president of Nokia’s MeeGo division, confirmed he will leave the company for “personal reasons.” Last month, Nokia went through a change of guard when CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo stepped down to be replaced by former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop.
A Nokia spokesperson has said the company’s MeeGo roadmap remains unchanged.
Meanwhile, Intel vice-president Doug Fisher told Forbes that the company expects to show the first smartphones running MeeGo operating systems early next year and have them in hands of consumers by mid-2011.
“All this has added confusion to MeeGo’s prospects, especially given the tremendous stride being made by alternative operating systems such as Android and iOS,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst with research and consulting firm Current Analysis. “Given the management changes at Nokia and the possibility that MeeGo phones could be delayed, it leaves question marks about the future of MeeGo.”
Over the last three years, the rise of smartphones and the growing popularity of tablets and streaming media players has opened the doors for new operating systems that can promise a better user experience. For instance, Android, which launched in 2008 for smartphones, has now spread to tablets and has even birthed Google TV, a platform that combines cable TV programming with sites from the internet.
MeeGo hopes to do something similar. But it started small. Last year Intel started a project called Moblin that would be a Linux-based operating system designed specifically for netbooks. Separately, Nokia had been working on a Linux-based software platform called Maemo for smartphones and tablets.
At the Mobile World Congress conference in February this year, the two companies decided to combine efforts and spawn a new OS called MeeGo. MeeGo is now hosted by the Linux Foundation and has expanded its reach to phones, tablets, TVs and even in-car entertainment systems.
Both companies desperately want to control a next-generation mobile OS. Nokia has heavily relied on Symbian, which enjoys massive popularity worldwide but is saddled with an archaic, needlessly complicated interface that hasn’t adapted well to the world of touchscreen phones. And Intel has seen success supplying its Atom chips to the netbook market, but hasn’t made significant inroads into smartphones; it’s hoping that an OS might help it leverage its chip business into a new market.
In the next few weeks, Intel plans to release a version of the nascent OS so developers can start creating the user interface required to put MeeGo on different devices. MeeGo with an Intel-developed skin is expected after that. MeeGo will have its first developers’ conference in Ireland in November.
“From a product perspective, we expect to show smartphones and tablets on MeeGo in mid-2011,” says Ramirez.
Already some intrepid device makers have released MeeGo-based devices. German company WeTab is offering a MeeGo based tablet, while U.K. company Amino has shown a TV that runs MeeGo.
Still Greengart isn’t convinced that plans for MeeGo won’t change. Intel is dependent on Nokia to deliver the hardware that will bring MeeGo to consumers and Nokia’s big management changes could affect MeeGo’s future, he says.
So far, Nokia has said that it plans to use the Symbian OS for low and mid-level smartphones and build MeeGo into high-end devices that are more focused on computing.
“The problem is that Nokia executives, including the CEO who talked about this strategy just a week or two ago, are not there. And who knows what’s going in the company,” says Greengart. “The future of MeeGo depends on how much Nokia and Intel are willing to stick to their plans in a fast-changing world.”
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Photo: MeeGo Phone browser (Steve Paine/Flickr)
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