The MeeGo Conference in Dublin has attracted over a thousand attendees from all over the world. The diverse audience includes Linux hackers, engineers from prominent hardware manufacturing companies, mobile technology enthusiasts, third-party application developers, and software consultants. The conference-goers exhibit a powerful sense of optimism about MeeGo--despite the fact that the emerging platform doesn't ship on practically any mainstream devices, yet.
Nokia discussed its product strategy during the opening keynotes, but did not disclose the roadmap. The company initially planned to announce its first MeeGo-based device this year, but has pushed it back to 2011. Its handset lineup is still dominated by the struggling Symbian platform, which lacks a competitive user experience and falls short of key rivals. Nokia has been slow to execute its MeeGo strategy, but has recently started to refocus and pick up the pace. Intel has also been slow to fulfill its mobile ambitions, too. The chipmaker has not yet delivered an Atom processor that is suitable for smartphones, though the tablet-friendly Oak Trail chip is expected to arrive next year. The next MeeGo Conference is scheduled for May, and could possibly bring some of the hoped-for announcements.
While Intel and Nokia work with their partners to ready MeeGo for mass market consumption, Google's Android platform is handily gobbling up smartphone marketshare and is beginning to expand into new form factors like tablets and set-top boxes. Despite Android's rapid growth and strong consumer appeal, hardware makers remain hopeful that MeeGo will mature into a compelling alternative. Growing concerns about Android's lack of transparency and non-inclusive governance model, diverging kernel, insular userspace stack, and general lack of conduciveness to running existing Linux software are creating an incentive for hardware companies to evaluate other options.
MeeGo's relative vendor neutrality, close alignment with the upstream Linux ecosystem, and greater flexibility imbue it with the potential to be a better option than Android. The platform's strengths are promising, but the amount of time that it is taking for all of the pieces to come together doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in MeeGo's ability to match Android's rapid pace of development. There is a window of opportunity for MeeGo to achieve success as a mainstream platform, but that window won't remain open forever. Google is said to be working on a major overhaul of the Android user interface and other improvements that could boost Android's suitability for tablets and broaden its significant lead over MeeGo.
Although there are considerable challenges ahead for MeeGo as a holistic platform, it's important to understand that the MeeGo project has become broader than the vertical pre-integrated software stacks (netbook, handset, and car computing) that we tend to think of as constituting MeeGo. It's a subtle point, but is arguably one of the most significant take-away messages of the MeeGo Conference. There is a new class of MeeGo adopters who are taking advantage of the project's infrastructure and certain components at the lower levels of the stack in order to accelerate their own embedded Linux projects for niche hardware. These companies can collaborate on just the parts that are relevant to them without having to embrace the entire stack.
The Linux Foundation has worked to encourage this kind of participation with the aim of using MeeGo as a way to bring mobile companies into to the upstream Linux community. The significant number of MeeGo stakeholders at the conference who are not using the standard MeeGo verticals is evidence that this approach is working. One example is Amino, a company that built an Atom-powered set-top box using the underlying components of the MeeGo stack. Amino CTO Dominique Le Foll discussed the project during a keynote at the conference. He said that developing with MeeGo, PyQt, and the openSUSE Build Service (which is used extensively by MeeGo developers) helped Amino complete the product much faster than expected. MeeGo as a complete platform for phones and netbooks still has to prove itself, but MeeGo as a technology ecosystem for platform-building is already a success.
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