PR1.3 almost ready and MeeGo calling on the N900

In a post touching on a number of topics in the N900, Maemo and MeeGo arena; Harri Hakulinen summarises:

* The state of the MeeGo project on N900

* The improvements in dual boot support coming in PR 1.3 (shortly)

* The announcement of Carsten Munk's new role as maintainer for N900 adaptation

* An overview of MeeGo 1.2 plans

Some choice quotes: MeeGo is an open source project and if you choose to install the MeeGo image to your N900 device, you do it completely at your own risk. If you are not confident that you know what you are doing with it and why, please don't use it at all. Especially now, if you start playing with call software under development, you need to watch after your phone bill, as well. [...] On the Maemo side, there have been interesting, supporting developments going on, as well. The PR 1.3 update is quite close now, and with that you can easily dual boot between Maemo and Meego on your N900. There is also a possibility of developing applications supporting both operating systems, based on Qt and Qt Mobility APIs on the Maemo side. It means that you can develop once in PC with Qt Creator, and test your applications on both Maemo and MeeGo, directly on your N900 device! This blog post was greeted with hysterics from the "blogosphere" and sections of talk.maemo.org. It does NOT signify that Nokia have changed their mind about commercial support for MeeGo (or, more accurately, MeeGo-Harmattan) nor that MeeGo is finished, end-user ready or will ship with PR1.3. It means that developers will be able to reboot between MeeGo and Maemo, without having to have a PC nearby to temporarily flash the MeeGo kernel.

Ari Jaaksi hired by HP to work on WebOS

Ari Jaaksi, former vice president of MeeGo Devices at Nokia, has - it seems - been hired by HP to work on WebOS. According to All Things Digital: Sources close to the company tell me that Jaaksi has been hired on as senior vice president of webOS at Hewlett-Packard’s Palm division. He’s to start in November, after relocating to the Bay Area, and when he does, he’ll lead Palm’s webOS engineering team. Hopefully there was nothing coming up in Nokia/MeeGo which pushed him out; his hiring adds further credibility to the platform that was recently acquired by HP to differentiate themselves from the other Android-toting manufacturers.