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Intel Committed To MeeGo Despite Nokia Defection

Posted by Soulskill on from the keep-the-kid dept.

CWmike writes "Intel put on a brave face Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, insisting that there is continued strong support from it and many companies for MeeGo, the open source software platform that Nokia last week said it would abandon in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. 'Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on,' said Intel's Renee James. 'Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.' She pointed to a long list of companies participating in MeeGo development, including competitors AMD, TI and ST Ericsson; operators including Orange, Telefonica and Sprint; and software companies including Novell and Wind River. Intel expects to see MeeGo tablets shipping this year based on its Atom chip. Handsets will follow, James said. Despite its enthusiasm, however, Intel is sure to be negatively impacted by Nokia's decision."

17 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. As an N900 Owner... by BJ_Covert_Action · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let me be the first to say:

    Thank you Intel!!!!!

    --
    Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
    1. Re:As an N900 Owner... by mickwd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Going whole hog for W7 is a disaster for Nokia.

      Now if they'd gone for it as a stop-gap until Meego is ready, with promises to Microsoft that if they really make a good job of it then Nokia will continue to promote and sell it, then they've got a fair amount of leverage with the Beast of Redmond. Plus a lifeline if either one of W7 or Meego don't cut it.

      It wouldn't have cost Nokia so much to do that, providing that what they said about actually shipping a Meego phone isn't an outright lie - they'll have to bring Meega to some level of readiness to do that anyway.

      But instead they seem to have bet the farm on Microsoft, and Microsoft surely knows it. Nokia are going to get shafted.

      As well as that, they already seem to have alienated most of their own workforce, and a large chunk of their user community.

      (Yes, the N900 is very good - if they'd ported the latest Ovi maps, paid Adobe for the latest hardware-accelerated flash (which was already demonstrated running on it by Adobe), and polished a few of the standard apps, it would be superb. Still, lets see what happens with Meego).

    2. Re:As an N900 Owner... by rgunjan · · Score: 4, Informative

      @BJ_Covert_Action Appreciate the support from the Slashdot community! We are committed to MeeGo. We have a solid roadmap for meego on meego.com, and just released our SDK. We are also excited by the initial response from app developers. ~ Gunjan from Intel

    3. Re:As an N900 Owner... by miknix · · Score: 3, Insightful

      To be honest I've been impatiently waiting for a ARM-based netbook running Linux, during the last two or three years. Judging from previous /. commenters, I'm by far not the only one. With the latest happenings regarding the negative Nokia-Microsoft agreement and the continued beneficial commitment of Intel in supporting an open platform, I now realize that I'm mobilized to support Intel. I'm looking forward to acquire a Intel-based embedded Linux solution in the future and hopefully motivate myself in related opensource development.

      Thanks Gunjan for your words.

    4. Re:As an N900 Owner... by Nursie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Does Mappero give you the whole world, offline?

      That's the major win for Ovi maps, for me.

      I got used to its other quirks, and it guided me around the australian outback for months...

  2. Apps by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have no doubt that Intel can complete MeeGo alone if need be, and even find a company or two to release handsets (MS did, after all). The question is: how do they convince application developers to target it? There are already two well-established players, iOS and Android, which have the critical mass. WP7 was late to the party, and consequently struggles hard for developer attention, but it at least has the advantage of being easiest to develop for. And still, only 8k apps so far there, with many big players notably missing. When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?

    1. Re:Apps by arivanov · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The app developers are already convinced.

      MeGo is not just phones. It is in-car entertainment and navigation, set top boxes, smart white goods, home automation and so on. There will be plenty of apps written for those markets. Even if there will be no phones it will live on.

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
    2. Re:Apps by diegocg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      QT could be used to develop common codebases for Symbian, MeeGo, iPhone and Android (via NDK). Developers would be really interested in something like that, but for some reason Nokia doesn't care.

    3. Re:Apps by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's no different from Gnome or XFCE. Ie, you can run any regular Linux program on it, at most suffering from it not being well-integrated, just as if you ran a KDE program on Gnome.

      Yeah, right. Try running a typical desktop application on a 4" screen with no mouse (so no right-click etc). People have already tried that on Maemo - sure, you can run OpenOffice if you really want it, but it's borderline unusable in practice. Mobile devices need specialized UI.

    4. Re:Apps by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Since MeeGo is essentially a Linux desktop, most Linux "apps" that work on a normal desktop and can be compiled for Arm should run. A few UI tweaks should be in order to make them a little more touchscreen friendly, but MeeGo could have a large selection of "apps" quite quickly this way.

      This is the same argument as why Windows 7 (desktop one) on tablets is a good idea. It doesn't work in practice. UI "tweaks" are not sufficient - you need a major UI redesign to get the app truly touch-friendly. Furthermore, there is the issue of battery life - the reason why e.g. iOS does so well in that department is due to its severely restricted multitasking. In contrast, if you want to look at a typical battery life of a mobile OS where spawning extra processes and threads and letting them run all the time in background is free for all, look no further than Windows Mobile.

  3. How many can the market support? by proxima · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So we've got several big contenders or those who want to be in the "smart phone" space (an increasingly meaningless term, as even my dumb Symbian phone can do a fair bit). Android and iOS are the biggest, then you've got Blackberry, Win Mobile 7, WebOS, MeeGo, and in the "dumber" category Symbian.

    Three of these are Linux-based to one extent or another: Android, WebOS, and MeeGo. WIth the way apps get developed and sold, it's not clear to me that all three can survive on top of their more-closed counterparts (Blackerry and iOS, primarily). I've heard that various platforms are seeking compatibility with Android apps, but I doubt it'll be perfect.

    Given that Nokia seems to be giving up on it, MeeGo seems like the obvious candidate to be the one dropped (its technical merits aside). There's plenty of fragmentation within Android alone now. Personally, I think the biggest potential loss is either the dropping or downplaying of Qt by Nokia. It'd be awesome to see Qt become a cross-mobile-platform toolkit to aid developers (on everything but iOS, of course). While I switched away from KDE during the 4.X debacle, it's clear that Qt was superior in many ways. Its commercial underpinnings seemed to really bolster its quality.

    --
    "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
    1. Re:How many can the market support? by melikamp · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Cell-phone form factor can run full-blown GNU/Linux today. N900 was doing it in 2009. There are no more legitimate, hardware-related excuses for OS fragmentation: it exists solely because it pays to lock your customer into a proprietary platform. (This strategy pays off because a lot of otherwise smart people go stupid when they enter a store, and the reason for the latter is ads, but that's besides the point.) Don't be confused by Android being open-source: every Android-based phone on the market today is a proprietary platform. If official kernel security updates can brick your phone just because you dared to gain root, it's a proprietary platform. If your phone cannot work without proprietary drivers in the kernel, it's a proprietary platform.

      If cell-phone makers wanted to express good will towards their customers, they would throw some cash at improving Linux graphics and sound and released a lean, feature-full, and completely free cell-phone OS. We already have Wayland and Pulse Audio. Sans a few kinks, Linux is ready to go as an entertainment platform. They could still lock it up and sell it to idiots, and the idiots would still buy the locked-up versions (it's 2011 and people still buy Windows and OS X to fill spreadsheets, case closed). This would be cheaper for everyone, there would be no fragmentation outside of gaming, and everyone would have the productivity apps like PDF reader, ODT editor, Web browser. All these apps are already written. They are free, stable, and they were running for years in GNU/Linux and *BSD.

      I am disappointed in Nokia. I really, really like N900 but now I feel like I voted with my wallet and got bitch-slapped. I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax, a USB 3g (4g if later) adapter with open-source Linux drivers provided by manufacturer (yes, there are a bunch of them on the market), and ditching this whole cell-phone mess. And if you ever need to contact me, be it emergency, work, or leisure, write me a frigging email or join my XMPP server.

  4. Re:what has died is openness by blair1q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I say the opposite. Intel doesn't sell operating systems for a living, it sells chips. It only does software to get people to need more chips. It would be entirely in Intel's interest to make this OS as open and free as possible, to get it into as many hands as possible, to create demand for chips that will run it well.

  5. Re:Can MeeGo run on a PC? by duranaki · · Score: 3, Informative
    Yes? How about a conditional yes at least? Last I checked, only certain HW configurations were supported. My attempt to run Meego on a laptop a few years old resulted in utter failure. At the very least I think you need an Atom chip. For reference, from the Meego Netbook link:

    In general, MeeGo v1.1 for Netbook will run on Intel Atom* based netbooks, and has been tested on the following platforms: Pinetrail Netbook: HP mini, Asus Eee PC* 1005PE Nettop: MSI AE1900-B Notebook: Acer Aspire* One 5740-6025

  6. Defection? Nobody told me. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a Nokia employee working at MeeGo now, after last Friday's announcement almost like before. No, I'm not being fired, and none of the important projects have even been cancelled yet (some obviously untenable gunk is being descoped; good riddance). You'd have to wait a bit longer to see the "defection", I suspect.

  7. Intel CPUs not in the mobile space because... by lkcl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    [the original article wonders why intel hasn't broken into the mobile space, successfully]

    Intel's flagship CPU design consumes far too much power, and that really is the end of the matter. I really don't understand why people don't understand this.

    The entire x86 architecture is optimised for speed and low latency, whereas ARM processors are optimised for low power, trading that low power for higher latency.

    The interesting thing is that the latency trade-offs made in ARM (and MIPS) processor designs becomes... very much less relevant as the CPU geometries go down. 28nm means that ARM CPUs can easily run at 2.5ghz, and MIPS CPUs at somewhere around 2ghz. Combine these CPUs with modern 1066 DDR3 RAM i find it difficult to see how Intel and AMD, with their highly speed-optimised - and bloated - CISC architectures can beat the price-performance and performance-per-watt metrics in the all-important "good enough for most people" bracket.

    Sure Intel and AMD's offerings will always be "fastest", but do you really need a Six or Eight Core 4ghz CPU costing $1000 to do a few emails, when a $7 750mhz Dual-Core MIPS will do the exact same job?

    So right now, we're witnessing a series of "ship-jumping" moves - the blind leading the blind - in desperate bids to stay afloat, where the sensible companies are sticking with Free Software OSes, based around the Linux Kernel, because it's Free Software and the Linux Kernel that can run on absolutely any platform, and Windows simply can't.

    Microsoft cut off the DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS platforms, over 15 years ago in order for Windows NT to compete internally with Windows 95; now they're paying the price and they're going to take down with them anyone else who clings to their coat-tails.

  8. not just a bad decision... it's an implosion. by xeno · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The news is sad. I was stunned at what an amazingly powerful-yet-friendly platform Maemo is, and had high hopes for new Nokia N900-like devices running MeeGo in 2011-12. Instead, it looks like Nokia will be shoveling out devices running some zune-based drm-laden insecure crapware from Redmond. They're not getting my money to be sure, but the big picture is sad.

    Let's see the sequence:
    - Nokia picks up some executive deadweight cast off from Microsoft.
    - He steers Nokia to buying shiny-but-slow crap from his former employer.
    - He also dumps Nokia's Linux-based collaboration projects. (Maybe Elop's just a mole, and this was his main task?)
    - Nokia commits to releasing the massively-processor-heavy WinMo7 OS on cheaper hardware for developing markets. (**HTC snickers and says "Good luck with that, sucker!!! **)
    - Nokia investors recoil. The stock price drops... and keeps dropping.
    - Customers shrug.
    - Nokia employees assume this is a tacit admission that the company is going bankrupt.
    - The employees' Union asks about severance packages.
    - Nokia runs more ads for Symbian*3 on the N9... as if the higher-end N900 and its OS never existed.
    - Nokia can't easily retreat, having crossed/burned/blown up it's Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Android-related bridges.

    Summary: Burned bridges, impossible commitments, angry employees, a doofus CEO, declining revenues, bewildered customers, a weak economy, and it just got in bed with a company that eats its partners after mating.

    This isn't just a bad decision, it's an implosion.

    -x

    --
    I think not...(*poof*)