Intel/Nokia MeeGo phones are no go until 1st half of 2011

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 09 October 2010 22:33

Your IT - Mobility

Despite the iOS, Android and soon-to-come Windows Phone 7 onslaughts, Intel and Nokia's MeeGo OS won't be powering publicly available smartphones until the first half of 2011, according to an Intel executive, seeing the same kind of delays plaguing many other tablet and smartphone competitors.

In an interview with Forbes, Doug Fisher, Vice President of Intel's Software and Solutions Group and General Manager of Intel's Systems Software Division, said that MeeGo powered handsets would arrive in the first half of 2011.

Proclaiming to be 'very pleased with MeeGo's progress so far', Forbes noted that MeeGo 1.0 for netbooks was released in May, a 'preview' of the software for handsets was released in June and a 1.1 update with support for 'touch-based commands and telephony' for tablets and smartphones is due 'later this month'.

The article also notes that the WeTab tablet from the German company Neofonie will be the only tablet available this year with a MeeGo build, as well as some netbooks and TVs with IPTV capabilities, with plenty more to come in 2011.

It's a shame that Nokia and Intel couldn't get MeeGo out for 2010 in an iPhone iOS battling form, but if it's not ready, it's not ready and there's no point releasing unfinished products, or you end up with MeeGo's predecessor, the Maemo-powered Nokia N900, which although very powerful and practically a palm-sized laptop more than smartphone, completely lacked virtually all of the elegance found in the iPhone iOS and much of that in Google Android.

So, waiting longer is the order of the day. Indeed, delay seems to be in vogue at the moment as competitors are simply unready, while Apple sells millions of iPads and iPhones, and Google's Android powers millions of iPhone-clone/wannabe-killer handsets.

HP's WebOS inside a Palm Pre/Pixi update and a PalmPad has not yet been released, while BlackBerry's QNX OS powered PlayBook isn't coming until next year and any future QNX OS-powered BlackBerry devices are still months off from public availability, if not longer.

Microsoft promises Windows 7 tablets by year's end, but unless they come with a finger-friendly skin of some kind, they're just not as easy to use as Apple's iPad or Google's Android phones, even when tweaked to display bigger fonts, bigger scroll boxes and bigger buttons. Even if Windows Tablets come with a much more powerful processor than Apple's A4 chip, Apple still leads in thin-and light tablet stakes with battery life of 10 hours.

Perhaps Microsoft will better catch up when it releases its far more tablet optimised Windows 8, presumably sometime in 2011 or 2012. 

Then there's the very intriguing Windows Phone 7 devices with their smooth, bold graphics. They're said to be very imminent with a local October 12 press event to divulge more details, but they're still not here - and neither are any tablets which could be powered by a tablet-optimised Windows Phone 7 OS, instead of waiting for Windows 8'¦

More smartphone and tablet thoughts continue on page two, please read on!