One of the things that was not made clear during the announcement of the partnership between Intel and Nokia which resulted in the merging of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s maemo platforms was what was going to happen to Nokia’s flagship maemo device, the N900. There was no indication whether, and if, the N900 would qualify for an upgrade to MeeGo, the product born out of the union of Moblin and maemo. Thank goodness we now have some sort of indication – and it’s positive.
In a blog posting on the MeeGo website, one of the two members of the Technical Steering Group of MeeGo, a representative from Nokia, mentioned that a target has been set for the end of this month to have MeeGo ready in a very “raw” form so that it can run on the N900. At least that’s what I understand from this post. My Engrish not da very good, so I may have misunderstood; if you think I have, please do correct me in the comments. And much of the post is technical gibberish, at least to me. There’s even mention of virgins somewhere in there; so you have the ingredients of an interesting story with sexual connotations (I think). Again, feel free to correct me if I’m reading this whole thing wrong.
The timing certainly seems interesting and very aggressive. Either work had been ongoing for some time to make MeeGo run on the N900, or that MeeGo is essentially maemo and very little Moblin, which can explain the quick transition from maemo 5 to MeeGo. If this is true, Intel’s developer community who have invested in Moblin must be feeling a little p1ssed by now, because they will have to learn the intricacies of maemo since MeeGo is essentially maemo. I’m speculating, of course; if you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to share in the comments with links.
So there you go. This should make one feel better for buying a Nokia N900 knowing it will be upgradeable to MeeGo, and be able to run a lot more applications, assuming developers want to port their existing Moblin and maemo applications over to MeeGo.
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Chalk this one up to “huh”? Even before the HTC Desire aka Bravo has even launched, it appears that support to decode/playback DivX videos is in the works, but it won’t appear in the first units of the Desire which is scheduled to ship sometime next month (not in Malaysia but most likely in Europe and the US). This must be one of those rare cases when an update has been announced before a handset is even shipping!
