When Nokia effectively pulled the plug on MeeGo, the feisty, yet scorned operating system refused to yield, muttering defiantly that it “didn’t hear no bell.”
Well, MeeGo is now poised to make a comeback – not in Finland or the U.S. – but in Beijing, China.
Yes, Intel and Tencent are accelerating their efforts to promote the nascent platform, with the latter company agreeing to offer additional games for MeeGo tablets.
As Nicole Scott of Netbook News notes, China remains the “perfect” breeding ground for a wayward operating system like MeeGo.
“The unhappiness with Android is rampant – with it being kind of open and full of malware because of third party stores. The representative on stage for Tencent, actually said ‘Android is a Mess.’ Although a [rough] translation, it does express what appears to be a common sentiment in China,” explained Scott.
“When I asked around the press room is this was in fact true, the Chinese journalists confirmed that the lack of [real] marketplace support leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the consumer.”
According to Scott, Tencent’s commitment to expand its labs from 60 engineers to 100 over the next year is a good sign for MeeGo – especially since the company is attempting to leverage Intel’s recently launched Oaktrail processor for gaming.
Scott also noted that a new tablet spotted at the MeeGo fair boasted a revised UI which appeared to be “significantly different” than the version of MeeGo on display at MWC just a few months ago.
“The hardware is [fresh], looking to get branded by an OEM, and is based on Oaktrail. It’s a 10.1 inch device with a 10mm thickness running the Z670 1.50GHz processor with an 1GB or RAM and an SSD of an unknown size.
“Taking a walk around the tablet you’ll find an accelerometer lock, volume rocker, a physical camera button, headset, mini usb, micro sd, SIM card slot, wifi on/off, docking station port and stereo speakers,” Scott added.
