A new Meego 1.2 release has just been announced that with a little work – should be of interest to Nokia N900 owners and could be present on the mythical Nokia N9. Meego came into existence in early 2010 as a coming together of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin open source operating systems and so while Nokia is no longer looking to Meego as the primary OS for its high-end smartphones………….
Amanda Hoic has a half hour long video to show us MeeGo 1.2 Developer Edition and this is of course not yet finished and neither is the developer edition for the general consumer. Just perhaps a platform for App development and another point of view about MeeGo 1.2 DE comes from BlueChrism who emailed us this a couple of days ago:
Slides
http://sf2011.meego.com/sites/all/files/slides/n900de_sf2011_20110525_final.pdf
The slides have probably been up a while, i’ve not tried to check, but interesting reading through and looking forward to watching the demos via the live stream. Interesting is the list of things working and not yet working, and I wonder how much of an indication this is of the state of MeeGo Handset project as a whole vs adapting the handset version for N900.What is working right now
● Qt/Qt Quick and MeeGo SDK
● Core use cases, with known issues
● Cellular voice calls
● SMS text messages
● Camera (with autofocus)
● WLAN and Fennec browser
● Handset UX for launching applications & settingsImprovement needed
● Device system performance, optimizations
● Applications (email, multimedia, calendar)
● Localization
● Virtual keyboard (VKB)
● HW keypad layout support
● Browser alternatives
● UI usability (or a new UI)If this is status as a whole, it does begin to make sense on why Nokia dropped Meego a bit, but hopefully we will find out more in the conference itself. The last one on the need for improvement is interesting – the MeeGo team themselves are unhappy with the current MeeGo UI? Maybe those comments are a bit harsh on the MeeGo developers.
Either way, this is probably the best look we will get at where the MeeGo handset’s project is until we start to see devices.
Oh – as far as WP7 goes, you have rightly suggested people not judge too harshly until they try it. As of today (for mucking about with) I have a rooted HTC HD2/Leo with Windows Phone 7 with Nodo on it (haven’t activated it yet, so one last hurdle to get through). I will certainly try it out, and am excited about the some of the Mango updates and the prospect of tight integration with XBox, Netflix and Skype, though I’m not sure yet that i like live tiles – anyway, i’m waffling,point is, i’m giving it a go as a user and an app developer.
