The latest version of Meego run very slick on the Nokia N900 and leaves us with a lot of un-promised surprises. The UI is as response as you’d find on an iPhone with all the spring bounce and transition effects showing up at each and every nook of the software. Since these are still developer builds we should expect a pinch here and there, but overall the progress seems to be just fine. Its bad that Nokia and Intel announced it months before the launch – seems like a bad idea w.r.t. building up competition, but however, the openness associated with MeeGo is definitely drawing developers who are burning the midnight oil to make MeeGo better with every single line of code. One other drawback that I could associate with MeeGo is that it’s being developer while keeping only intel based chipsets into the picture; this is just another way of loosing the market share as many mobile and tablet manufacturers have opted for Qualcomm and ARM based architectures and these devices would definitely be left behind in getting STOCK builds of MeeGo. Hackers however are always a step ahead and a few have already ported these developer builds of MeeGo to Nexus One, HD2, EVO and a few other Snapdragon based devices.

A bummer came in early today when VP of MeeGo ‘Ari Jaaski’ resigned. Executives from Nokia have been resigning left and right for the past few weeks – I hope this does not signify a red flag on Nokia’s roadmap and I really wish this all has been due to beaurocratic reasons, newer better opportunities and philosophical differences. Another unpleasant news for mobile enthusiasts came in with the announcement that they should not expect to see MeeGo based devices in 2010. Infact, Intel quoted that the devices could be delayed to a period extending to mid 2011; launch as expected would be in a large trade show! You can pretty much asssume HTC to have launched about 25 new Android devices by then, Microsoft wouldn’t stay back either while pushing Windows Phone 7 on each and every carrier; don’t forget the mighty iPhone and yea the few left over proprietary ones as well. With each and every phone release and a delayed launch Nokia/intel would just be killing the market that’s excited about MeeGo.

This is what Doug Fisher, an Intel executive who oversees MeeGo development quoted in an interview today:-

the project is on track, but concedes that MeeGo-powered smartphones–and tablets, for the most part–won’t debut until next year. We have been hitting our dates and we are very pleased with MeeGo’s progress so far

The 1.1 version of MeeGo would be make public to developers later this month. It would pack touch based command inputs and a lot of other telephonic enhancements.
Watch the video below to see smooth and sliver execution of MeeGo on N900 – seems like the device has been hardware accelerated.. isn’t it??