I love Maemo. I’m not even going to try to deny it. It is, by far, my favorite mobile device OS.
It is fast, flexible and highly customizable. It makes the Nokia Internet Tablets (N900, N810, etc.) a dream to use for nerds everywhere. (In fact, I have such a high opinion of Maemo, I included the ability to build applications for it in my visual development tool Illumination.)
But Maemo is dead. And it’s time to move on.
In its place is MeeGo. The project hosted by the Linux Foundation and spearheaded by both Intel and Nokia (the combination of those three organizations brings some serious street cred) and is, in a certain way, the combination of both Maemo and Moblin (Intel’s Netbook-focused, Linux-based OS).
This week, only a few short months after MeeGo was announced, we have the first release – MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks.
This first release of MeeGo… is basically Moblin. From an end user standpoint the two are only slightly different.
It is, without a doubt, meant for Netbooks.
And we’ve got a few months to go before we see a version of MeeGo that is ready to use on handheld devices (the current versions of MeeGo can be installed on the N900 phone’s… but it’s still mostly just a terminal for development purposes).
In fact… that is causing me a fair bit of pause. If we have the complete MeeGo user experience for Netbooks ready and shipping (you can install it on your Netbook right this moment)… why is the handheld device experience not ready?
Will the Netbook and handheld versions of MeeGo differ that much? Will the handheld version look more like Maemo 5 (on the N900)? Or is the time being spent to polish up the Moblin/Netbook interface to better fit on the smaller form factor of the handheld devices?
Right now we don’t have the official answers to those questions. Luckily we won’t have to wait too much longer as the handheld user experience is reported to be available for testing in the next few months.
And, on top of all that, MeeGo is utilizing the openSUSE Build Service to build projects for the different MeeGo versions. (If you haven’t looked into the openSUSE Build Service at this point, you really owe it to yourself to check it out… It is a fantastic way to put together packages for multiple platforms. Very cool stuff.)
So, all in all, I’m quite excite about MeeGo.
Really, the only bit that makes me have a frowny face is this:
- MeeGo will not be officially available for the Nokia N900. Though a development release will be… so you’ll be able to get MeeGo and use it on your N900… but not in an officially supported way. Which means…
- As of right now there are not phones/handhelds on the market that are slated to be upgraded to MeeGo. Which is a major bummer.
But, so long as Nokia can manage to get a new tablet style device (the “N900 + 1″ perhaps?) out that ships with MeeGo this year, I’ll be pretty okay with that.
In fact, I think it’s fantastic that Moblin and Maemo are now merged. If this allows MeeGo to advance at a faster rate… and makes it easier developers to ship their software on multiple devices… I’m down right excited.
The Maemo Community has created some phenomenal software over the last few years. And I have no doubt that the MeeGo Community (which is comprised of many of the same individuals) will do the same.
May 31st, 2010 - 7:00 am
Can’t recall where I heard this, but I’m pretty sure that as part of their strategy to keep the “user experiences” separate, the old Moblin UI is forming the basis for the netbook “user experience,” while the Maemo UI will be forming the basis for the smartphone “user experience,” while both user experiences will now be built upon the same core distribution (same package manager, RPMs, etc).
In other words, it sounds like they’re trying to keep the interface layer very much separate from one another, which, while well-intentioned, is a bit worrying.
I’m not very familiar with Moblin, but don’t they use GTK as the basis for their UI? Similarly, Maemo has historically been based on GTK, but Nokia previously announced that Harmattan (next version of Maemo) will move to a Qt-default environment.
If these plans go forward, we may be looking at GTK on the netbook, Qt on the smartphone. What does this mean for the tablet UI? And other form factors?
Regardless of the exact details, it’s worrying that there may be even more fragmentation within MeeGo. It’s already been announced that Intel and Nokia will have separate App Stores. Call me crazy, but I feel that we don’t need any more brand confusion than we already have!
May 31st, 2010 - 9:53 pm
I’m still living in denial that maemo is actually dead
Personally i’m hoping that meego for phones will essentially be what maemo 6 was gonna be, i.e. still look a lot like maemo 5 but built on QT instead of Gtk and hopefully not use much more than a shared core and build service with the rest of meego.
As it stands i think the moblin style UI would make for a disastrous OS when put inside a phone shaped form factor.