MeeGo 1.2 released, including Developer Edition for N900

MeeGo Developer Edition 1.2 is out just in time for MeeGo Conference, with the N900 Developer Edition also being released for the first day: This update promises to provide a solid baseline for device vendors and developers to start creating software for various device categories on Intel Atom and ARMv7 architectures. If you'd like to try out the release, bear in mind despite the polish, it is still primarily intended for developers.

MeeGo Conference keynote: disappointing

As you may have noticed, we published this week's edition a bit later to make sure we could catch any breaking news from the MeeGo Conference. The conference, in San Francisco, runs for the next two days and has already had a successful warm-up weekend.

Unfortunately, the keynote didn't deliver anything new or noteworthy. The session, moderated by The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, was renamed at the last minute from "The Future of MeeGo starts now" to "Monday morning with MeeGo"; not an auspicious start. The first hour was a pitch about Linux and open source. If the target audience was OEMs, ISVs and investors; the answer to the questions being posed was Android, not MeeGo (in fact, MeeGo was barely mentioned at all).

This was the MeeGo Conference keynote, instead of championing - and demonstrating - the success of MeeGo 1.2 and the N900 Developer Edition, we got a pitch on open source & Linux and a ragbag collection of guests - some rounded up at the last minute over the weekend.

The overall reaction on Twitter, and talking to people, was disappointment: not at the lack of exciting freebie devices being handed out, but that such an opportunity was wasted.

PocketNow grabs Nokia Harmattan device teaser ad

The web got whipped up into a bit of a frenzy this week when PocketNow posted a video on YouTube purporting to be a teaser for Nokia's Harmattan device; showing a device with similarities to the leaked photos floating around last year, this may be the rumoured "developer device" running Harmattan. However, despite the convincing visuals, the audio was the intro to "Jessie's Girl", cutting out just as it got started.

The original video has been taken down, however Mark Guim has stills showing the device and there are more copies of it now on YouTube. A new blog post at Nokia Conversations features a stage with drawn curtains, a reference to Jessie's Girl and talk of the innovations being pursued at Nokia: One area of innovation that’s continually evolving is the ways in which a phone’s interface might be innovative. To offer new value, we can’t just be talking about a new set of icons or even more home screens. That’s not innovation, it’s just an increment. An innovation in interface design will make our interactions quicker, more natural or simpler – and so offer users value through the time and effort they save. [...] At the moment, of course, our technology is far from natural. There's nothing natural about icons and drop-down lists and tickboxes. It would probably be better if you could just swipe through your apps, wouldn't it? We've delayed publishing this issue until late Monday so we can react to the news at the opening day of the MeeGo conference, but there was no sign of Nokia's Harmattan device, indeed - no mention of Nokia at all during the keynote.