Felipe Contreras, a Senior Software Engineer at Nokia who lives in Finland and works on hardware adaptation for MeeGo, meaning he’s part of the team who makes sure MeeGo will properly run on shipping silicon, said in a blog post yesterday that he received an email from Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, that one of MeeGo’s biggest problems going forward was the small amount of devices currently in the pipeline. Felipe says that’s absolute nonsense, that no one he knows believes what Stephen Elop has to say about the matter, and that they could throw MeeGo on as many number of devices as they want to since all the complicated work required to get MeeGo to run on a Texas Instruments OMAP processor had to be done just once. If Nokia wanted to make MeeGo devices that run on other chips then yes, more effort would be required, but there’s absolutly no reason Nokia can’t just build different devices using the current software/hardware combination that currently makes up the N9. In fact, that’s how Nokia has made most of their devices up till now, optimizing Symbian for one chip and then coupling it with a high end camera in one model, a large screen for another model, or one with a QWERTY keyboard for yet another model.
Windows Phone on the other hand, as it stands today, only runs on one chipset: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. That monopoly enables Nokia to not have to worry about making Microsoft’s new mobile OS run on different chips, but also limits the amount of variety of devices they can have. Felipe says that in this respect MeeGo is superior, and when he made that point to Stephen Elop, he responded with a simple message that said: “I am simply going to choose to respectfully disagree on multiple fronts”, but failed to actually insert any logic to support his statement.
Something’s fishy.