Intel To Forge Ahead With MeeGo

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It’s Mobile World Congress time in Barcelona (our own Chris Smith is there covering it live) and it was at last year’s Mobile World Congress where Nokia and Intel announced that they were combining their own mobile Linux efforts (maemo and Moblin, respectively) into a combined effort dubbed MeeGo. We hadn’t seen anything like that before, but since then, some drastic things have happened. Nokia is largely abandoning MeeGo, but Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, has announced via statement that they will go ahead with MeeGo development.

There may be some hurt feelings between Intel and Nokia. TechCrunch Europe reports, citing inside sources, that Intel and their engineers working on MeeGo received no early warning from Nokia and found out when the rest of us did that the company would be abandoning Symbian and MeeGo for Windows Phone 7.

In a statement, Intel reaffirmed their commitment to MeeGo, saying that they plan to support a wide range of devices and operating systems, including Windows, Android and MeeGo. “While we are disappointed with Nokia’s decision, Intel remains committed to MeeGo,” they wrote. “Since day one, our strategy has always been to provide choice when it comes to operating systems, a strategy that includes Windows, Android, and MeeGo. This is not changing.” Intel went on to promise MeeGo phones will be still shipping this year. Probably not made by Nokia.

The third major partner who was contributing to MeeGo was AMD. In case you’ve somehow been living under a rock (or don’t read tech blogs), AMD and Intel are fierce rivals in the processor space, and it’s hard to imagine them working together on anything. Why would two publicly-held companies work together on a platform that they both envision running on devices using their processors? It’s like helping somebody make the knife that they’ll use to stab you in the back. I suspect AMD will quietly bow out of MeeGo shortly.

Look for Intel to make waves this week at the Mobile World Congress. At CES last month, they held off announcing or talking about any new mobile products, instead telling us to wait until MWC. Hopefully, they’ll have something new and interesting to take on ARM, rather than just some new Atom processors.