Ex-Nokia staffers team up to revive MeeGo A number of former Nokia employees have banded together to maintain the MeeGo smartphone OS and even release new hardware running the software. Formally launched this weekend - though its LinkedIn page says it has been around since 2011 - Jolla "will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones", the company pledged. …
Seriously doubt that Nokia would buy them. If they are successful, they may end up buying Nokia itself
There are a lot of moving parts in play.
I wish them well since they know low power usage and they would cater to a market that wants to have their phone be more of a phone than a gaming platform.
Not had the chance to fiddle with MeeGo as much as I'd like, but Maemo before it was fantastic as a smartphone operating system (and by smartphone I mean "a phone you can do advanced things with", not "a phone that is shiny and sells well to idiots"). It still has the best multitasking of any smartphone OS, hands down, and can do more out of the box than pretty much any current smartphone, let alone those present at release.
Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing what Tizen can do. So long as it doesn't turn out like Bada...
I agree with A/C 10:30.
Good luck to them with this, but I got one of the Touchpads and, after planning to put Android on it and never getting round to it (and discovering preware), I found that I really like webOS.
I have high hopes for Open webOS and really hope some phone and tablet makers pick it up and run with it.
MeeGo is *really* good. It's slick and functions really well. In fact I have trouble faulting it. Also all the people I've shown it to are impressed and ask where they can buy it - dear me, if only they could.
That's why it was so gaulling for Elop to cast it aside in favor of a far inferior OS in WP. They'd done all the super expensive R&D.
Great news that someone is going to capitalise on the work already done.
Meego on the netbook wasn't that much better than Ubuntu netbook remix at the time. As for the Intel tablet project I was writing software for well considering they could never get Meego to run stable on the device (probably more due to Intel's shit Atom hardware than Meego but still) which may be why Intel was so quick to abandon the platform. Meego was ok but was basically still born and lives on those that dream of what could have been.
Nokia are well shot of these chancers good riddance to bad coders. Nokia are better off with Windows Phone and as the platform continues to grow and Microsoft add more features the synergies between their great software and Nokia's great hardware will become apparent.
The Windows Phone 8 offerings from Nokia will tempt people away from the Malware ridden fragmented Android platform just you wait.
This post has been deleted by its author
> The Windows Phone 8 offerings from Nokia will tempt people away from the Malware ridden fragmented Android platform just you wait.
We've been waiting since Feb 2011 and nothing significant seems to have changed. Apart from Samsung snatching Nokia's position as the #1 mobile maker (both smart and dumbphones), some now-obsolete Lumias released to a cautious welcome, Nokia's credit fating transformed from AAA to junk status.
Last time I heard a friend of the wife showing off her new mobile phone ("I don't like Apple, so I went for a Windows phone") I rushed downstairs in the hope of finding a Lumia "in the wild"... turned out it was actually a high-end Android.
In retrospect there's a lot of truth in that... Android is pretty much the Windows of the phone world, with the same characteristic strengths and weaknesses: cheap, ubiquitous, a dizzying array of platforms, vendor lock-in traps, fragmented hardware, vulnerable to malware, less stable and reliable than the Apple alternative (as the owner of a WIndows PC and Android phone, it pains me to admit that last point).
What I *am* waiting to see is whether the transition to NT kernel means that Windows 8 mobile devices will become just as malware-riddled as Windows PCs.
Let me see...
XBL? Nope, not available in Malaysia
Zune? Nope, not available in Malaysia
Store? Yes, but very limited compared to other countries'.
Bah, even Apple has finally gotten off their asses and launched the music store and movie store in Malaysia now.
WinPho? No thanks, for the crap support MS has in store for Malaysian users, I'd pass.
However, I can't see the room in the mobile market for a very good very expensive phone from a relative unknown. Perhaps they'll manage a great launch product they can use to showcase and end up succeeding, but I can't see it.
Please, please let them prove me wrong.
So you looked a one random location. How about http://n9-apps.com/ or http://store.ovi.com/applications#/applications/?terminalId=N9 or any of the Apt repositories you can use with your MeeGo device.
If the new company can turn a profit, that's all that matters. It just needs to find a niche, not to aim for the top 3. There are plenty of people wanting a proper open source mobile device, not an Apple walled garden or a Google ad trojan.
"not an Apple walled garden or a Google ad trojan"
I suspect this is trolling, but anyway... Either the Meego stores are walled gardens (i.e. software only accepted after thorough review), or they have the potential to contain advert ridden software or malware. Care to explain why it's technically special in either of those regards (i.e. not its current relative obscurity making it undesirable to write software for)?
No, there are fewer apps for it because nobody cared. It was just a too-late-platform that could have worked had Nokia actually got it out the out the door on time.
I don't understand the love people on here have for Nokia when RIM is nothing but a joke. Is it because they are being ravaged by the bad man from M$?
"I don't understand the love people on here have for Nokia when RIM is nothing but a joke. Is it because they are being ravaged by the bad man from M$?"
It's not a love of Nokia at all. I couldn't care less about the new Lumias, really (though I kinda like WP7). It's a love of Linux, and how brain-buggeringly brilliant it was when Nokia did it.
Windows Mobile fell a generation behind, and has never been able to catch up even given Microsoft's vast resources. The same thing happened with Blackberry, and now they're in a death spiral.
Regardless of how good it was when it was released, the world has moved on. So how are Meego going to catch up?
Hardware keyboard please (one like on the E7-00 would be fine - the N900 keyboard is too small), decent navigation, decent dictionaries (like the mobisystems ones - although the synthesised speech on the built in E7-00 dicitonary is cool), and finally, allow compilation using gcc 4.7 or above *on the device*.
I was pleasantly surprised how well Swype works on the N9. Every once in a while you have to teach it a name, place or funky word but most of the time you just blaze away with just yourt thumb. Nevertheless, folks who use consoles a lot would likely still want a hardware keayboard. So yay for that!
but so is MeeGo now and it kicks major ass. As long as they manage to be profitable enough that'll be just fine. I have doubts about a different UI as the Swipe UI is so utterly brilliant that it might be hard to improve upon but easy to mess up. Then again, these folks should know what they are doing. I really welcome this development.
I have an N950, which along with the N9 is perhaps the best phone Nokia ever produced, and I was becoming a little worried that in future I'd have to go the Firefox OS/Tizen HTML5 route, failing that Android maybe even BB10.
Windows Phone and iOS were obvious non-starters.
Wishing Jolla all the best for the future, they've certainly got my interest.
Whilst I hope this works out, I can't help feeling they've brought over some of Nokia's arrogance with them - i.e. when the market goes one way, Nokia carries on blindly - and look where it's got them.
I just can't see this having any impact at all, and raising the capital to make phones is going to be an enormous challenge - without operator ranging they're simply not going to be able to afford it. Still someone has to try, so good luck to them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
