At the moment it is nothing more than an unconfirmed rumour but it seems that Intel is to stop development on MeeGo. MeeGo was a partnership between Intel and Nokia. The main reason for the partnership was to help Intel with the adoption of their mobile processors (Intel Atom) as ARM has been the dominant CPU for device manufacturers. ARM, a little company from Britain has given the big corporate (Intel) a few headaches. Intel I believe thought that Nokia would choose the MeeGo platform for their top of the line smart phones.
In all honesty the concept was a good idea but it was doomed from the beginning. Think back to the infamous “burning platform” email that Steven Elop wrote to Nokia staff members. Nokia has been losing market share to a number of other manufacturers and a case can be made that the company lost focus. Thus Nokia partnering with Microsoft makes sense for both companies.
Meego was never destined to compete with the other mobile operating systems; it was merely to help Intel regain lost ground on ARM. Secondly it was potentially a way for Intel to help deal with their longstanding software partner Microsoft. Microsoft no longer sees Intel as the only manufacturer of CPU’s. The problem that the current mobile CPU’s from Intel have is that they are resource intensive. Battery life and mobile operating systems are two very interlinked themes for manufacturers and users.
LG and ZTE were rumoured to have agreed to use MeeGo with support coming from China Mobile. At the time Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility was not a factor. So there was a lot of potential for MeeGo but the latest changes to the mobile ecosystem have pretty much ensured that Meego will disappear. Will you consider going into a competitive market with an unproven operating system? I think not.
At the moment there are quite a number of mobile operating systems:
- BlackBerry OS – Which powers a wide variety of BlackBerry devices
- QNX whom BlackBerry bought at a premium will be used in the new range of Torch models and future tablets
- Android – Need I say more?
- iOS from Apple that has dominated the higher part of the mobile ecosystem
- Windows Phone 7 – Which will subsequently power new Nokia phones in early 2012
- WebOS – The future is rather uncertain for this project
- Symbian – Which is no longer to power Nokia’s new offerings
- Bada– Samsungs offering which is to be used with Fridges and Smart LCD TV’s soon
There is quite a variety (keep in mind that Android is very fragmented as most of their partners use different versions of the software) and it provides a great deal of choice to both manufacturers and users.
The point I am trying to make is that MeeGo should never have been made public, rather something like a memorandum of agreement between both companies. The fact that it has become public knowledge will now lead to it being seen as a failure for both Intel and Nokia.
