MeeGo demonstrated on video

We’ve seen some screenshots before but that’s never as good as some video of the upcoming MeeGo smartphone operating system.

As you can see in the video below, we get a little walk through of MeeGo running on a TI OMAP 4 prototype hardware. We get to check out the Settings, SMS, Contacts and a bit of the lock screen too.

There are no transition animations yet but it looks pretty darn good. I think it takes a pinch of iOS, a dash of Android and a whole lot of webOS. Things look relatively smooth and stable and this is still not finished software.

As you may recall, MeeGo is the love child of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo platforms. There will be a MeeGo event in November and Nokia is expected to show off a new high-end handset.

Nokia will likely use MeeGo as its platform of choice for its high-end smartphones, while Symbian will power the tier below that. The early signs are positive but the platform may have a difficult time attracting developers away from its rivals.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think in the comments.

[Via PhoneDog]

About The Author

Marin Perez

Marin Perez has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android but he finally broke down a bought an iPhone to see what all the hype's about. He also has too many tablets.

Slobodan

Goog god, they are so late …. This would be promising if it were in 2006
- Anonymous
  
  Maemo (the os in Nokia N900) is still by far the best mobile operating system. How can they be late with an improved os?
http://ricegf.com ricegf

Didn’t you say the same thing about Android last year?

In any event, Meego has a lot going for it – strong support from the dominant phone manufacturer (Nokia) and processor manufacturer (Intel) in the world market, a mature and well-regarded development environment (QT4) which just released a major upgrade with acclaimed new and unique features (such as QML), and adoption by over 30 major corporations targeting a broad swath of the computing marketplace (tablets, netbooks, TVs, in-vehicle, feature phones, and of course smartphones).

Apps written for Meego will also run on Symbian, which controls over 40% of the worldwide smartphone market today, and potentially on Windows and desktop Linux as well. And the first Meego tablet included a Dalvik instance, so it can not only run legacy Maemo and Moblin apps, and new Meego apps, but also Android apps.

Meego has already been adopted by major Linux firms such as Red Hat in their latest Fedora 14 release, for use with netbooks and other touch devices that accept custom images.

Whether Meego can grab a sustainable share of the world smartphone market, or the tablet or netbook markets for that matter, in the next couple of years is certainly open to debate. But those markets are still high-growth markets, so it would be naive to conclude that the market has already closed to well-supported new competitors with some unique advantages.

Time will tell.
Jim

@ricegf:
To paraphrase a journalism saying, you buried the lead in your fourth paragraph.

Meego may take off with ‘super phone’ consumers….and it may not. Note that, unlike Nokia’s Symbian line up, Meego devices will be competing with the premier Androids (Droid X, HTC Evo/Deside HD) and iPhone 4.

The window on *that* particular market may have shut, especially if you consider, per Nokia’s Savander, that Meego was meant to be pitched towards U.S. consumers.

The problem there is largely one of branding. Years of neglect and of association of the company name with burner phones sold in bodegas and 7-11s has knocked the Nokia name in the U.S. into the dirt.
Luke

@Jim:

You are acting like the smartphone war will be won or lost in the USA…
Obviously nokia would like to get entrance into the market because with 2% market share or whatever they have it presents an opportunity for rapid gains in market share and better online coverage through the very vocal american bloggers…
Meego was hardly designed for Americans though, its simply presents as a more attractive option for the american market where symbian is not as popular.

Nokia dont have to increase their market share though if they just maintain it and increase the profit margins per phone sold (which will be done through open sourcing their OS’s and cutting R&D costs) they will do very well…. so technically if they are doing this well with s60 (still shipping more units per month than any other OS, let alone indervidual company world wide) , the logical expectaction is with Symbian^3 & Meego, they will have more sales, and hence maintain or even improve market share.

I think a lot of people underestimate nokia’s long term strategy with open sourcing both meego & symbian and using QT for both, it made them ‘dead in the water’ for a while, and you could definately argue that their recent situation wasnt planned, its put them in a position now where from a technical standpoint they have a strong future with applications being cross compatible, a transparent community driven development process and better developer support through QT…. All they need to do now is bring it all together and get new phones out there to restore their name… which when you look at motorolla and the droid really only takes one good phone…
Josh

Huh? Why is the screen so tiny? Why does it show 2 screens at the beginning?