MeeGo to go beyond mobile devices

According to a Yahoo! news report, Intel is planning on creating an edition of the MeeGo mobile operating system for desktop systems running Intel's Core processors. The plan was disclosed by Doug Fisher, vice president of software and services group at Intel, during an interview, but no timescale was mentioned for the desktop version. Fisher said that the first editions of MeeGo will be focussed on mobile devices, set-top boxes and TVs, with a MeeGo for mobile phone handsets due in October and MeeGo for netbooks expected in the second half of the year.

The separate editions of MeeGo are being created to accommodate the differences in user interfaces, screen sizes and CPUs between mobile devices and desktop systems. Fisher said Intel's plans for MeeGo, which was created in February by the merging of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, is to provide an OS optimised to allow devices with Intel chips to easily communicate with each other. MeeGo is being developed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation with support from a number of Linux distributors and OEMs. The first developer releases of MeeGo, less the user interface elements, have already been made available.

(djwm)