MeeGo Maybe, Maybe Not Heading To Nokia N900

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Nokia and Intel caused some excitement when they announced they were merging their mobile operating systems into one that would be called MeeGo. Considering that the Nokia N900, Nokia’s current high-end smartphone, shipped with Meamo, Nokia’s half of MeeGo, it was assumed that MeeGo would run on the Nokia N900. Unfortunately, that may not be the case, or it may be.

CNET’s Crave blog sent a request to Nokia regarding the Nokia N900 and MeeGo and found out that the device won’t be upgradable to MeeGo. Nokia writes, “Maemo on Nokia N900 is not upgradeable to MeeGo. The first MeeGo device is targeted to be released during the second half of 2010. However, applications written for Moblin or Maemo Qt APIs will run on MeeGo.”

We covered this in our earlier piece on MeeGo where I wrote, “It’s unlikely that we’ll see anything as drastic as MeeGo being applied to the Nokia N900 via a OTA update.” So this news isn’t entirely unexpected, but it has taken another twist.

Valtteri Halla, a manager in the MeeGo technical group who first posted information about MeeGo’s progress last month, posted on an official Nokia blog. He writes, “N900 is a natural tool for Nokia to drive MeeGo support for our designs and for the ARM CPU architecture in general. [...] That said, please do not take this yet as a commitment to fully productise [sic] MeeGo on N900. [...] I am not yet sure if I would be personally ready to let my Maemo5 go for the first MeeGo release in my daily N900 use.“

So, despite Nokia PR’s comments to Crave, it’s entirely possible that we could see MeeGo make an official release to the Nokia N900. While it probably will never be an OTA update that the telcoms would run – it could be something like an optial upgrade for power users.