At the Mobile World Congress Intel and Nokia announced the Meego platform in a joint press conference. Nokia‘s flirtation with different operating system platforms looks to continue, but this time the new platform is actually consolidation of two, and not an entirely new one. Their Maemo platform, which provides the underpinning of the N900 handsets will integrate with Intel‘s Moblin (Mobile Linux) platform for mobile internet devices and netbooks.
The Linux Foundation (which already hosts the Moblin project) will also host Meego. It will use the Qt graphical toolkit to provide the user interface. The challenge will be in integrating the code bases and providing these to developers quickly. Then both the Moblin and Maemo communities can benefit from the code merge.
Having a single platform to develop for is good, but having a platform at all is the better. Let’s see how long it takes for Intel and Nokia to offer published APIs and a working code repository.