Nokia's MeeGo smartphone OS revealed at Intel conference

Paul Nesbitt

Intel showed off the first preview of the MeeGo smartphone OS it is co-developing with Nokia since the two companies announced they were working together at last February's Mobile World Congress.

And Nokia is working on a MeeGo smartphone with a 4in touchscreen according to reports in China's Commercial Times, which has contacts with the large contract manufacturers there. Nokia's MeGoo smartphone will not ship until 2011, though.

MeeGo, which is a Linux-based amalgam of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo OSes, is designed to function as an OS which will run a variety of mobile devices ranging from smartphones, through to tablets and notebook computers.

Intel's MeeGo demonstration showed the OS running on a netbook, a TV and an unidentified smartphone.

MeeGo looks like a modern smartphone OS with a Firefox browser (supporting Flash), extensive social networking integration, gaming, and apps for mail, texting, image viewing and telephony.

Have a look at the video of the MeeGo presentation here.

For Nokia, MeeGo is intended to be the company's answer to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android/Chrome platforms. For Intel, MeeGo is designed to promote the adoption of its Atom range of power thrifty processors, which have so far lost out to the widely used rival ARM design, which most smartphones use.

And whatever its merits, MeeGo faces a stiff challenge. Not least because it will be so late to market. It has already been dubbed 'MeToo' by some analysts.

And there are signs that MeeGo's backers are hedging their bets. Intel has announced that its Atom processor can now run Google's Android, while there are rumours that Nokia's MeeGo smartphone may actually use an ARM-based processor, and not Atom.