Nokia may no longer be directly involved with Meego, but the platform has been pushing forward all the same and 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 we've been hearing a lot about lately.
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, there's still a large chunk of Nokia's DNA present in Meego as it stands today.
NFC, Meego and Nokia C7 at the Meego Conference
Last week saw the three-day Meego Conference take place in San Francisco, and the release of Meego 1.2 was the headline announcement. According to the Meego technical steering group, it provides “a solid baseline for device vendors and developers to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom and ARMv7 architectures”.
In simple terms, it's a release aimed at the latest processor technologies found on tablets and netbooks, adding a host of new features and performance enhancements aimed at a wide range of mobile devices. The downside – at this stage – is that the Nokia N900 isn't one of those devices. But all is not lost: a Developer Edition is being crafted to bridge the gap to the Nokia handset and add features such as voice calling, SMS and camera support to Meego 1.2 to make it suitable for smartphones.
If you're of a technical bent, the Meego Technical Steering Group is still trying to hammer out a couple of issues before with the Developer Edition before the platform can be declared fit for service on mobile phones – you can check out the Developer Edition's status on a dedicated page over at the Meego blog.
And let's not forget: Nokia still plans to release a Meego phone at some point this year, which we're hoping will be the Nokia N9 we got a sneak peek of recently in a video preview that was quickly removed. Will it have Meego 1.2 running on board? We're certainly looking forward to finding out.