Nokia and Intel combine Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo

Now, how about that - Nokia and Intel shook hands to merge their mobile Linux projects into one. And along came MeeGo. The silly name aside, MeeGo is the blend of Nokia's Maemo, used on the Nokia N900 and a few others, and Intel's Moblin, which powers MIDs based on the Moorestown platform.

MeeGo

With what seems to be the right heritage, MeeGo will power anything from smartphones through tablets and netbooks to connected TVs and car entertainment systems. The supported CPUs are apparently quite diverse too - Maemo runs on ARM processors, while Moblin is optimized specifically for the Atom-based Moorestown platform.

This means there won't be a unified app store however, which is a shame. Ovi Store will be the go-to place for apps for all Nokia devices, while those running on an Intel platform will use the Intel AppUpSM Center.

The Qt toolkit sees to it that developers will have to write an application just once and deploy it on several platforms - that includes MeeGo on ARM or x86 CPUs, even Symbian and other OSes.

MeeGo will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and is completely open source.

The first release of MeeGo will be in the second quarter of this year and the first devices to use the new OS will come some time after that. There's no word whether MeeGo will be available for Nokia N900.

Symbian^3

The other news from today is that Symbian Foundation unveiled the first release of the long awaited Symbian^3. By the end of March the S^3 is expected to be code complete while the first devices based on the new platform will show up in 2010, Q3. Luckily, we already know what to expect from the S^3.

It should offer advanced usability, faster networking as well as 2D and 3D graphics acceleration (with OpenGL ES support), which is warmly welcome when it comes to games and applications. And thanks to the more efficient memory management more applications will be able to run at the same time.

The Symbian^3 will also feature support for HDMI output, while the hardware acceleration will boost up the user interface: there will now be multiple homescreens full of widgets.

Switching from cell network to Wi-Fi will happen automatically but most importantly, Symbian^3 is 4G network ready.

Ovi Maps and Ovi Store doing fine

In the meanwhile, Nokia were keen to brag about more than 3 million Ovi Maps downloads which makes more than one download per second. And the Ovi Store is doing even better: more than a million downloads are registered each day!

Unfortunately, Nokia didn't have any new phones to announce today at the MWC 2010. We surely hope they'll take care of that tomorrow.

Source: Nokia