Unlimited potential
Nokia and Intel only announced they would be combining their respective open source mobile operating systems a month and a half ago, so the opening-up of the MeeGo repositories yesterday wasn't a bad effort.
In a blog post on the MeeGo site, director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center - Imad Sousou - said: "Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community."
Developers can now get hold of the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and the OS base including the Linux kernel, the OS infrastructure and the middleware layer. MeeGo is intended to provide a common platform for all types of mobile computing, including phones, netbooks, IVI and TVs.
Ultimately Intel and Nokia are trying to take on Android with MeeGo and will be hoping a greater range of applications will give it a competitive advantage. It's also worth noting that, while Intel and Wind River are both members of the Android Open Handset Alliance, Nokia isn't. Furthermore, Intel has to play nice with ARM on this one as the repositories include one for the Nokia N900, which runs on the Cortex A8-based TI OMAP 3430.
The N900 won't be seeing MeeGo anytime soon, however, and Nokia is working on v1.2 of the software for that handset.
Here are a couple of videos jointly released by Nokia and Intel at the time of the MeeGo announcement.
