Nokia Preps Linux OS For Low-End Smartphones

itwbennett writes "Nokia is going after the low-end smartphone market with a Linux-based OS code-named 'Meltemi.' The phones are expected to cost under $100 without subsidies. A Nokia spokesman's no-comment comment went like this: 'Of course, we don't comment on future products or technologies. However, I can say that our Mobile Phones team has a number of exciting projects in the works that will help connect the next billion consumers to the Internet.'"

Comments

Re:Now there's a threesome /. doesn't see every da

[Imbrondir]

Cheap low end hardware has changed since the Palm III

They are probably thinking about an 600-800MHz ARM9/11 cpu with 128-256MB of RAM, with a GPU that can still draw 30 million triangles per second and play 1080p videos (like say the 25$ raspberry pi coming out this november). Also Nokia is moving upcoming Qt 5 rendering to run almost entirely on OpenGL (ES). This will probably make the UI on such devices (GPU with a cpu tacked on) smoother than on a high end Android 2.x phone.

Then again, they could just as well do this on existing Symbian devices.

Re:WTF??!

[EvilNTUser]

According to rumors I've heard, this isn't Linux as we know it. They're going to run Qt as close to the hardware as possible with everything else stripped away. And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.