MeeGo - a new category in OS from Nokia Intel

"Intel and Nokia have announced a partnership" in which they will merge Maemo and Moblin into a new product called "MeeGo", aimed at just about any type of device you can imagine. This is one of the rare moments of convergence in the mobile Linux space.

It's totally unclear what form these new devices will take. It's not even possible to guess whether the device will look like a netbook, a MID, or a smartphone.

The news was revealed during a press conference Tuesday that was conducted jointly by Intel ultra mobility group senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher and Nokia executive vice president of devices Kai Oistamo.

The aim of their relationship, they say, is to explore the opportunities presented by this trend and build new kinds of mobile devices that will give users a richer Internet experience. Noting that Intel and Nokia are the leaders in computing and communications.

The strategic relationship consists of plans to develop new Intel chips that will power the devices and collaboration to boost Linux-based mobile software solutions. Intel has also licensed Nokia's 3G modem patents so that chip maker can expand its connectivity offerings.

MeeGo

Intel's Linux-based Moblin platform is positioned to become one of the most prominent on Atom-based netbook devices and it has attracted strong support from a large number of popular Linux distributors. Nokia's Linux-based Maemo platform, which powers the company's Internet Tablet devices, is a mature and highly-polished solution for handheld ARM devices. These platforms have much in common and share many underlying components, such as Xorg, D-Bus, and GStreamer.

MeeGo will build upon the Moblin core operating system, with Qt being the application development environment. It will be hosted in a completely open fashion by the Linux Foundation, so everybody can join in on the fun. It will run on pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs, in-vehicle infotainment systems and more.

MeeGo using Qt has a major advantage: Qt now also runs on Symbian S60 and Symbian^3, and Nokia stressed that applications written for MeeGo only have to be recompiled in order to run on Symbian.

MeeGo platform architecture

Qt is a very modern development toolkit that is well-suited for building resource-efficient native applications. It has a relatively new declarative programming framework called QML that radically accelerates the development of rich user interfaces. During my tests of QML development on the N900, I've found it to be a powerful solution for constructing touchscreen-friendly software.

A key advantage of Qt in the mobile space is its inherent portability. It is supported today across a wide range of desktop and mobile operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Symbian.

Nokia's decision last year to relicense Qt under GNU's Lesser General Public License (LGPL) makes it possible for third-party application developers to build commercial software with Qt without having to pay a license fee. The toolkit is already relatively popular in the software industry and has been used by a wide range of mainstream software vendors, including Google, Adobe, and Skype. Given all of the major advantages of Qt, it seems like an ideal choice for Nokia and Intel's next-generation Linux platform.