Intel is establishing a joint innovation center with Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet firms, to develop products and services around the chip maker’s MeeGo mobile operating system and devices using its Atom processors. The new partnership could help Intel to promote MeeGo in China, along with its Atom-based microprocessors.
Meego is going to be one of the most well funded Linux projects ever.
Let’s hope it will be more productive than the Nokia way of “dropping loads of money at a project to kill it because of management issues”.
Take a look at this new Meego Tablet UI demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJAzuhogdHk
Looks pretty middle of the road to me. Looks slow, clunky and several years behind iOS.
Heck even the iPed could look reasonable when you do minimal things, very slowly.
Looks better than iOS to me. But that’s not the point. The point is, that Meego UI is being actively worked on now. That’s good. So decent products can come out this year already.
Edited 2011-04-13 14:51 UTC
Looks modern, innovative and overall better than iOS
Hahaha, yeah sure.
So is Intel now the primary driving force behind MeeGo or is Nokia still involved in a way?
Edited 2011-04-13 11:48 UTC
Nokia is involved, though less than before, and no one knows for how long it will last. Nokia promised to release a handset running Maemo 6 (Harmattan) with Meego compatible API, and promised that this upcoming device will support Meego proper as well. This will be probably the first handset with decent Meego support.
Edited 2011-04-13 14:54 UTC
Intel want to tie MeeGo in with it’s hardware. But not only for hardware I guess but as an foundation for probable Intel software services in the future.
The first big hardware push from Intel with MeeGo is starting to take place in China.
It is setting up it’s main MeeGo research centre there.
Like Michio Kaku said, powerfull processors is going to be very cheap and everywhere in the future and hardware businesses and traditional hardware makers, especially Intel is on the diversifying path. Intel certainly has the cash to do it.
Nokia is still involved and treating MeeGo as a sort of fallback system.
I dont want to make sketchy ridiculous predictions but I think Intel is going develop some applications/games(especially MMO’s) and tie it exclusively into it’s own hardware.
China’s MMO revenue is predicted to reach $8 billion dollars in 2014. India is also an huge market.
However Windows XP market share in China is still at a 82%.
It seems tieing an subscription based entertainment product to your hardware while keeping the underlying hardware cost lower by pushing it with an free operating system seems to be the way to go.
It might not operate it’s application/cloud services and gaming directly into Intel brandname but acquire/establish subsidiary gaming houses and critical application software makers under an Intel umbrella.
Edited 2011-04-13 20:01 UTC
So far Intel didn’t make any drastic moves to hinder let’s say ARM Meego support and etc. So Meego remains cross hardware still. Since more vendors are invited to be involved with it, tying it to Intel hardware only is not going to happen.
AMD too joined MeeGo, so it shouldn’t be completely tied to Intel architecture.
Edited 2011-04-14 08:09 UTC