Categories: Mobile Phones News   Tags: , , , ,

Remember MeeGo? No? Well you’re not alone. It was Nokia’s attempt to keep up with iOS and Android, developed in conjunction with Intel, before Nokia jumped in bed with Microsoft and Windows Phone.

Well now it looks like a Finnish startup made up of ex-Nokia employees will be giving it the Frankenstein’s monster treatment, attaching electrodes to its temples and juicing it back to life.

The startup is named Jolla, and intends to make handsets that use the defunct operating system. Jolla’s chief operating officer is Marc Dillon, who spent 11 years at Nokia, and was MeeGo’s principal engineer. So if anyone knows the OS, it’ll be him.

In a statement, Jolla said: “Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.

“Together with international investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production.”

Now, we’re all for competition, but does it really think it compete with the likes of iOS and Android? Nokia obviously didn’t think the platform was strong enough, hence its deal with Microsoft.

The operating system has also been superseded by Tizen, which Samsung is rolling its Bada platform into. So it seems like everyone has agreed MeeGo has had its day.

But still, let’s wait and see what Jolla comes out with before writing it off. It does seem a shame to spend all that time and money developing an operating system for it to never be used.

Source: SlashGear

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  • Heikki Kultala

    It seems you really are not knowing what you are talking about.

    Nokia N9 did compete very well against ios and android – most reviews said it was better than either. And Nokia did not market it much but it still sold a lot in areas where it was available. And Nokia had even better product, N950 developed but they refused to bring it to market.

    And about Tizen switching from QT to EFL and HTML5 I think this was more a political than technical decision; After Nokia dropped away from the project, Intel did not want to use technology owned by Nokia(QT).

    Windows phone on the other hand. It’s just technologically inferior, and the “ecosystem talk” is bullshit.

    There are LOTS of good programs available for N9 today – there is nothing wrong in the ecosystem. On the other hand, WP7 lacks many features required for creating good programs, and Windows Phone 8 is only a small improvement, AND WP7 and WP8 are not compatible. So , in reality, WP7 currently has much worse ecosystem than N9/Harmattan/Meego.

    And microsoft claims that same programs will work on WP8 and desktop W8, but in practice the situation is different; mouse + keyboard require completely different UI than touchpad + finger, and also the screen are very different, so programs developed for WP8 will have bad usability on desktop windows and vice versa.

    The reason Nokia dropped Meego was because the Nokia managers did not understand anything about software development – first they failed badly by sticking with SymbianOS(which was terrible for software developers) and refusing to sell Maemo-based phones(they did not put cellular modem to nokia 770, n800, n810, so that they would not compete against symbian phones). And when they finally released N900 they did not really market much.

    Then when they finally decided to commit building Linux-based phones, instead of just continuing developing their own DEB-based Maemo, they starting their cooperation with intel, which had RPM-based Moblin, to create Meego.

    There was lots of extra friction from this “cooperation”, and in the end N9 did not use practically anything from intel – it was just Maemo6(Harmattan). Only the following models would have benefited from the cooperation.

    Also the management did stupid things like oursourcing too much, and the Symbian-believers still tried to sabotage the Meego development.

    When the upper management finally understood Symbian strategy won’t work, they did the even stupider thing: did not understand how different symbian and mMeego are; they got scared and dicided to drop all own operating system development, dropping the saviour Meego with the crappy Symbian, without giving Meego a change.

    • http://twitter.com/SirKneeland John Kneeland

      “So , in reality, WP7 currently has much worse ecosystem than N9/Harmattan/Meego.”

      As an owner of both devices, I find this statement absurd. There are many great indie apps created by the community for N9, but it doesn’t have the kind of major first-party support that WP has (which is still a far cry from iOS and Android, but much greater than MeeGo Harmattan)

  • http://www.facebook.com/sergi.greg Sergi Greg

    Welcome back Meego

  • http://twitter.com/Krustylicious Taras Dhedhi

    Another rubbish article by electronic pig.

    Firstly wp, compared to what symbian could shift, and android is now shifting – “nobody” wants wp7/8/9/10. Its dead.

    Coming back to Maemo/meego, Intel screwed things up for meego and basically nokia and intel wanted two different things so the partnership didn’t work.

    Samsung would dearly love to ditch android, it knows its wafer thin margins with android are susceptible to crashes, look at htc, once the darling of android now floundering like a whale.

    Remember meego, is linux without the JavaVm crap that is android, less cores and thus less power is needed to run it …

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