Nokia's MeeGo Device Still Coming Out Soon

Nokia is passionate about Windows Phone 7, but it's still flirting with MeeGo.

"You're going to see the first MeeGo device soon," Nokia's executive vice president of smart devices, Jo Harlow said in an interview on Wednesday.

Intel's MeeGo OS, which was developed as a joint project between Intel and Nokia's previous administration, was one of the losers when new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said the company was switching to Windows Phone 7 in February. But, at the time, Elop said the company would use MeeGo for some cutting edge devices.

Since then, rumors about Nokia's MeeGo device have been flying around the Internet; it might be called the N9 or the N950, it might run an Intel Atom processor, and it might or might not have a QWERTY keyboard. There are even YouTube videos purporting to show the device, but none of them are verifiable.

"I'm not going to comment on what's been floating around the Internet," Harlow said. "It'll be more of a high-end device that certainly will attract the early-adopter geek. I think there's some innovation there that we believe captures the imagination."

Without Nokia, MeeGo has been drifting in the market. I was unimpressed with MeeGo tablets and laptops I saw at Mobile World Congress in February. Recent announcements by Red Flag and other Chinese software companies, though, show that the OS may have a chance in that market.

Windows Phone 7 is triumphant at Nokia, but Harlow had some kind words for the platform that could have been, and left the door open to more MeeGo devices in the future.

"We made the decision not to continue to develop the MeeGo platform simply because it wasn't mature enough yet to build a whole portfolio around," she said.