A Peek at Nokia’s MeeGo Operating System, Hopes to Steal Shares from iPad & iPhone

One of Nokia’s strategies to compete and regain market shares in the high-end device market is its latest MeeGo operating system.  MeeGo is a merge of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Linux-based Maemo to power mobile devices, smartphones, and even tablet computers. The announcement seems to be ahead of schedule, as a previous statement from Intel said to expect the first smartphones early next year.

Harri Hakulinen from Nokia was subtly hinting the MeeGo Community Website that the operating system could be available in its mobile N900 device, and will be first paraded to the public this mid-November during its first developer conference in Dublin.

A blog post entitled “MeeGo Calling — on N900″ said that the last phase of development of MeeGo version 1.1 will give application developers something tangible to work with.  Also, the N900 operating system, Maemo and MeeGo can run on a device all at the same time after an update they will make. He warned though that this should be done carefully saying:

“If you choose to install the MeeGo image to your N900 device, you do it completely at your own risk. If you are not confident that you know what you are doing with it and why, please don’t use it at all. Especially now, if you start playing with call software under development, you need to watch after your phone bill, as well.”

The warning isn’t too shocking, considering Nokia was quick to point out its need to still polish its own platform. As Nokia is undergoing a number of internal changes to address its market drop, it looks to MeeGo has a potentially powerful way to add value to the mobile community. So far, the software and device updates Nokia has done have not proven to be capable of competing against Apple.