Intel to “temporarily discontinue Meego OS development”. Meego R.I.P?

Staska  By on 02 Sep 11

According to Taiwanese Digitimes, Intel is planning to “temporarily discontinue development of its MeeGo OS” .

I don’t know if it’s true, and I have no idea what the word “temorarily” means in this context, but if there is even a shred of truth here, it’s extremely bad news for Meego.

When Nokia pulled out of Meego camp on Feb. 11th, it was more or less obvious that the most ambitious part of the new OS is dead. There were rumors that Intel was trying to salvage the smartphone opportunity by offering to buy Nokia Meego assets (proprietary phone/radio tech elements, Swipe UI, etc; ). But fins refused to sell, and without Nokia technologies, Meego on smartphones became simply too hard for anyone else.

But there still was an emerging tablet market, netbooks and all the consumer electronics stuff like TVs, GPS Navigators, etc; that needed to get smart- a huge potential opportunity for Meego. Unfortunately, now it seems that even that was too hard for Intel. Devices with Intel chips running Meego are getting nowhere, while ARM based alternatives on Android are taking over the world. So Intel is throwing in a towel on its own OS efforts, and will try to salvage former high performance chip dominance, by getting its chips better for Android and Windows Phone.

I wonder if this Intel inability to develop their part of Meego was the reason for Nokia to drop out of the alliance in February and go with Microsoft. After all – the first Nokia Meego smartphone – Nokia N9- is actually more Maemo Harmattan, then Meego device. And what the heck Nokia execs where thinking in early 2010, when they derailed their own Maemo project and got in bed with Intel?But that’s water under the bridge.

If Intel pulls out of Meego, despite the loud community protests that will surely come, and promises to keep fighting, the big opportunity for Meego to become a major OS in CE industry is over. Meego may remain alive as a small enthusiast project for years, but without any big vendor heavily committed to it, it will never break out into the mainstream.

 

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  • Mutosan

    I dont know the word temorarily but it sounds like temporarily :) or they ment something like demographical.
    What I know, that MS is the wrong alliance for Nokia and is the reason nokia goes away from open source. In my eyes a realy bad decision. Never had such a versatile Mobile phone like the N900 and I hope the N9 will get equal to it.MS is doing such things all the time. They buy enterprises and mostly destroy them or they make alliances and try then to control the others. We have still a big need for free systems. People who want to be lead by a company and teir restrictions so be it. I want to have a free and open system.

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