Asus announce MeeGo netbook
Presumably one of the upcoming device announcements Arjan mentioned at the MeeGo Conference, Asus has announced an inexpensive Atom-based netbook available with MeeGo: At the Computex trade-show, ASUS has launched a new netbook, the Eee PC X101, which uses the MeeGo OS as its default operating system. The X101 has a 10 inch screen, weighs around 950g and is just 17.6mm thick. It uses an Intel Atom N435 processor running at 1.33 Ghz and is available in a range of colours and configurations, with pricing starting from around $200.
Acer Iconia M500 tablet runs MeeGo on an Atom CPU
Acer has also joined the (small) group of companies shipping or planning to ship MeeGo devices with their newly announced Iconia M500 tablet. It's the first in the company's new M Series and runs MeeGo atop an Atom (Moorestown) processor. Its appearance and dimensions are strikingly similar to the company's Android tablet, the A500, and that similarity extends to the resolution of the screen as well: 1280 x 800. The MeeGo interface is a custom Acer skin offering what was described as a "snackable UI." The point seems to be to offer instant access to the things you care about, and the brief demo we saw featured a set of live widgets organized around an "Acer circle." The notable part of this announcement is the custom UI running on MeeGo. Acer announced it to be on sale at the end of this year.
Nomovok port MeeGo to Nook Color
The Nook Color is an interesting device, as it offers very high quality hardware specs at a very reasonable price (given Barnes & Noble's plan to subsidize the device with book sales). Effectively an oversized N900 (OMAP3621, 512MB RAM, 7" IPS touchscreen, etc.), and very hackable, it makes a good potential target for a MeeGo tablet. Unfortunately, efforts so far have been stymied by driver and kernel issues. Evidently the folks at Nomovok managed to get things running. Ash over at MeeGoExperts covers: Now the guys at Nomovok ported the software stack onto the device taking about 1 weeks of a developers time. The biggest issue to overcome was the touchscreen panel controller which they needed to hack the driver to overcome. Most of the rest of the time was taken making x-window run adequately well. At present it has working WiFi, TouchScreen and Hardware Button controls. Still to resolve are BlueTooth and the Gravity Sensor. You editor took an interest in the device last year when B&N offered a sale through eBay. Sadly Android truly is sub-par and my device has been waiting in a drawer for a real OS to deliver it to usefulness.