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AMD Joins Intel's MeeGo OS Effort
angry tapir writes "In an effort to expand software compatibility for its upcoming Fusion chips, AMD has joined rival Intel's efforts to develop the open-source MeeGo OS. AMD 'will provide engineering expertise intended to help establish the technical foundations for next-generation mobile platforms and embedded devices,' the company said in a blog post on its website."
3. In 2 years when the 'tablet computing' fad has largely blown off, Intel and AMD will realize that its just not that important to keep pushing down their marginal revenues until its just not worth the investment to keep with it.
I just don't agree that 'tablet computing' is a fad. Bill Gates was definitely correct that this form factor held lots of promise but Microsoft just could not untether themselves from the Windows gravy-train and thus constantly missed the mark with their tablet OS (not to mention pricing put it well out of the general consumer market). Intel got lucky in an emergency conspiracy with Microsoft to kill the netbook market but the tablet market is out of their control (with upcoming wave: Google/Android, HP/Palm, and RIM/BlackberryOS will put a permanent dent in PC sales). I bet both Intel and AMD are pretty disappointed in Microsoft's lack of real competitive OS here and have no "in" with the tablet players of today.
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Nokia has been supporting Maemo as an also run Windows mobile type smart phone OS for a long time, and having iPhone, Android, WebOS, and WP7 absolutely blow their offerings out of the water means that something had to change with them. I'm not sure why they just can't pull something compelling together, but its hurting the company until they work on getting something. I personally think that bringing in Qt was a bad decision which has at least in a small part hindered efforts to get product to market.
I agree with everything else but this. Have you used an N900? Maemo is the most capable of the mobile OS's and it's a solid progression from the previous versions. The interface is slick - four desktops with useful widgets, combined IM/SMS/SIP "conversations", nice view of multiple running apps and more. The reasons it's niche is because Nokia has not aimed Maemo at the general public, but instead has targeted a small geek market. In fact the N900 is marketed as a mobile computer, not a phone. I'll bet their next Maemo or Meego offering will be a smart phone.
Qt has long surpassed GTK and since Nokia owns the company they'd be nuts not to use it. From what I can tell they've done a fine job of transitioning developers.
*puts on anti-Nokia troll hat*
I don't know about hats, but it sure sounds like you're trolling!
What's stopping Google from using code in the MeeGo base?
MeeGo uses a (somewhat) stock kernel, I believe. Android puts in all kinds of special sauce not in mainline like wake-locks.
Drivers written for Android aren't necessarily going to just work in MeeGo, unless you add all that additional stuff (cruft?) to the kernel, etc...
Like most popular distros, MeeGo uses the standard GNU userland; Android uses their own, non-GPL userland.
we'll probably see a lot of cross contamination between Android and MeeGo kernel code.
Sure, anything that's from upstream.
(I suspect that since Android's source is completely open, there would be no...
Android, like MeeGo is largely open. But there are certain things that are not released under a FOSS license (e.g. some drivers, particularly power-related and graphics-related drivers).
On Android, I believe that all of Google's core applications are completely closed-source. What's more, it's non-trivial to set up the phone to sync with non-Google servers.
Nokia would steal Google's UI code and Dalvik
I don't think that Android's UI is particularly better or worse than MeeGo's.
And Dalvik? That's like asking the MeeGo folks to go stick their hand in a beehive filled with thousands of tiny little Larry Ellisons with stingers. Surely, you must be joking!
Google would steal their best threading, i/o, and whatever other code is probably superior in MeeGo that isn't probably going to wind up in the base kernel trunk
Part of the whole point with MeeGo is to try to get as much stuff pushed up into upstream projects as is possible. If there's some good threading or i/o improvements to be made to the kernel, it seems reasonable that the MeeGo kernel devs will work hard to get it into mainline. From my perspective, Android has an "after the fact" attitude towards kernel development, whereas MeeGo has more of a "let's cooperate with upstream" attitude.
I don't know if ARM is working directly on the Linux kernel/Android or not
Sure. One of the projects they sponsor is Linaro. Linaro is a projects tasked with making it easier to deploy Linux-based systems on top of ARM: http://www.linaro.org/
coding is life
nokia hired peter skillman - designer of palm pre - as UX designer of meego (or meego based nokia products).
When is Nokia getting its own icon? They are quite a big (understatement of the year) player in the daily lives of us Mobile devs.