Here’s more news from the Intel side of the world. They have been holding their Developers Forum event in Beijing and took the opportunity to give the first live demoes of the MeeGo mobile OS. For those of you with poor memory, let me remind you that this is a joint venture between Nokia and Intel, which was announced at this year’s MWC (Mobile World Congress). Both companies dropped further development of their own mobile OS’ (Moblin and Maemo 5) and created a common platform instead.
The strategy behind this was simple — Intel badly wants in on the mobile gang and Nokia has suddenly woken up from slumber to realize that its market share is shrinking and fast. So the the world’s largest chip maker teamed up with (still) the world’s largest handset producer to make something that will give both companies what they want. But of course, Nokia needs it more desperately than Intel at the moment.
Intel’s demonstration of the MeeGo 1.0 OS consisted of showing the OS running on four different devices — TV, netbook, mobile handset and kiosk. As you can understand from that collection — Intel is trying very hard to get in everywhere it possibly can. The company has realized that the bigger, faster processors won’t win the mass market, the smaller, more efficient ones will. This is why it focussed on Moblin and the Atom SDK at the US IDF last year. But it didn’t take them long to change their minds.
Embedded above is a video demo of the MeeGo 1.0 OS running on an Atom netbook. As you can see, the UI is very clean, fresh and extremely similar to the way Moblin looks now. So it is likely that Intel and Nokia are only sharing the core framework and implementing the UI their own separate ways.
The UI’s main organization is through tabs. The tabs separate it into several important zones like contacts, applications, social networking updates, instant messaging, media, etc. Judging from what we see on the video, the tabs are switching quite quickly and smoothly. But since this is an extremely light weight OS, it is expected to run this fast on a 1.6 Ghz Atom powered netbook. The real test is going to be how well it runs on a less power device, like a mobile handset powered by a 800Mhz processor. But we have not come across a demo video that shows the mobile phone implementation in action, so it is hard to tell.
According to what Intel has to say about it, MeeGo should have no problems running on smaller and low powered devices because it was purpose built to run on such devices. Just like its parents, MeeGo is a Linux-based mobile OS. Development for MeeGo is being done on QT, which is a very common tool for developing for Linux. It has a wide compatibility across all the different Linux distributions. The core framework and QT are things that Nokia and Intel will have in common. MeeGo will be able to connect to Nokia’s Ovi Store or Intel’s AppUp Store depending on what kind of device it is running on. MeeGo will be compatible with both x86 and ARM architectures. This is of course a necessity because Intel Atom processors are x86 chips and most mobile phones are powered by ARM chips. Much as Intel would like Atom to be on mobile phones, they are still very far away from achieving that level of performance and efficiency.
Intel’s demonstration of MeeGo running on these different devices mainly served two purposes — to show that it is capable of running on those platforms and to show off the syncing capabilities of the OS even when it is running on different devices. MeeGo demo devices pulled and shared content between each other and things like playback position were remembered during sync so that a media file left off in the middle on the netbook could be resumed from the same point on the mobile phone after syncing. This is also supposed to work between all the other devices that were on display, thus showing the promise of synergy between household electronics.
MeeGo is due to arrive in the later half of this year. Nokia is yet to give a demonstration of MeeGo on one of its own devices but has given word that the N900 will be shipping with MeeGo when the OS is ready. Nokia will probably upgrade the N900 hardware when this happens to keep up with the market. LG is the only other company who has declared that they will carry a MeeGo handset. It will be powering their GW990 model.
Thus MeeGo is all set to make a splash, no matter how small, later this year. But I don’t see it making much of an impact in the smartphone industry in the US and the European countries. It might take off in other areas of the world where Nokia has a better hold.
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