Intel shows off Meego

CHIPMAKER AND SOFTWARE HOUSE Intel has shown off its incarnation of Meego 1.0 at the Intel Developer Forum held in Beijing.

The mobile operating system is a collaboration between Nokia and Intel that was first announced at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The two firms combined Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo to form the open source, Linux based Meego. The devices on show at IDF cover a number of markets and show off the capabilities of Meego to provide streamlined interoperation between devices loaded with the operating system.

Meego isn't limited to Intel processors, however one of the videos showed the operating system running on an Acer netbook based on Intel's 'Pine Trail' Atom chip. The user interface, which is likely to be different from Nokia's implementation, does a pretty good job of showing a slick tabbed interface to handle fairly basic Internet oriented tasks.

That demonstration also showed a relatively basic 3D game loading, however no real gameplay footage was shown. Switching between the game and the landing screen, it was clearly visible that multi-tasking capabilities are enabled, with the game paused in the background while the demonstrator was showing off how various social notworking accounts can be aggregated into a single tab. Although switching between applications and tabs was swift, it should be remembered that the netbook has a 1.6GHz Atom processor and Meego will also have to run on much smaller devices, with processors that are a great deal more thrifty when it comes to power consumption than the Atom. So Intel obliged.

The second demo shows the difference in Meego's user facing features on a number of devices, including another netbook, this time a Lenovo unit, a mobile phone, a television and even a kiosk.

It also showed off a very small part of the Meego app store which was used to download a specific video player. The impressive aspect of all this was the seamless ability to have Meego devices aware of what video was playing on part of the Meego network and consequently able jump to that part of the view and play it on the current device.

Both demos are of course merely technology showcases, however even at this early point it's clear to see that Apple has another open source, Linux derived mobile operating system as a competitor to its Iphone OS. µ