Nokia seeks salvation in Meego and Symbian OS

ADMISSIONS OF INADEQUATE PERFORMANCE began the keynote speech 'Transforming Nokia' at the Open Mobile Summit in London, which also heard about plans for the Finnish mobile phone company's Meego operating system.

After its senior management admitted a few weeks ago that the company known for high end handsets had dropped the ball on smartphones, Nokia's Meego computing vice president Alberto Torres sought to draw a line under the issue, saying, "It has not been a smooth ride. We did not [do] as well as we should have," and moved swiftly to address the future.

He told the audience that the company intends to strongly differentiate its products. Torres contrasted entry level phones having social networking capabilities with smartphones, such as the N8, that initially will use the Symbian OS, and he talked speculatively about future Meego "mobile computers".

Torres told The INQUIRER that a future Nokia Meego device could be a "very high end smartphone", and said that the company aims to have its first product running Meego in the market later this year.

He also emphasised that while Meego is an OS created by his company and Intel, it is open source code that can be used by others. He did not rule out a non-Nokia Meego device being launched before his own company's. He said that operators can build on top of Meego and he referred to the announcement that Meego had been released for netbooks.

Talking about a possible range of Meego devices, Torres said he expects that "much of the functionality will be identical". Adding to the Adobe Flash versus HTML5 debate, Torres expects Meego devices to support Flash because "it is used so widely". He also predicted Meego might be used for web television and in-car entertainment devices. µ