Meego: Next android?

At last week's Mobile World Congress (MWC), Microsoft released the new smartphone operating system Windows Phone 7. Almost at the same time, Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, and Intel, the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer, announced their respective open-source smartphone platforms maemo and moblin (both of which are based on the Linux kernel) merge [1] to create a new smartphone platform meego [2]. With the strong performance of the iPhone and Android, the smartphone market in the next two years will be a brand new situation, at least better than the previous iPhone. It is worth mentioning that, although the previous claim that maemo should be used as an alternative version of Symbian, Nokia said it would not give up the development and maintenance of Symbian, symbian will continue to play an important role in low-end smartphones.

As for Intel's moblin, it seems that Chinese developers should be more familiar with it, because intel and csdn have previously held several development competitions. But previously, moblin did not really enter the smartphone circle. It is active in mobile internet devices (MID), on-board information systems, portable media players (PMP) to personal navigation devices (PND), and digital set-top boxes (STB) to a laptop. This cooperation with Nokia is also Intel's first attempt on the smartphone operating system. Meego emphasizes rapid development and good user experience ("Enables an open ecosystem for rapid development of exciting new user experiences").

Although the cooperation between the two giants, I don't think meego will have much impact on the existing smartphone market. The reason is very simple: Nokia and Intel are not part of the leading group of smartphones, there is no horizontal business integration. Unlike Google's Internet, Microsoft has desktop software. The rapid development of Nokia in this field has quickly turned it back into a loser, with the latter + the latter = two the latter. The expectation of both parties for meego is for "Future Computing Devices" rather than simply smartphones. Meego's first release is expected to be released in the second quarter of this year.

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[1] http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/20100215corp.htm

[2] http://www.meego.com/