MeeGo Developer Edition for the N900

As reported yesterday by Jukka Eklund (Product Manager at Nokia) on MeeGo Development list, the Nokia N900 will get own version of MeeGo - the N900 MeeGo Developer Edition. A dedicated team will be formed for this project, together with the current N900 Hardware Adaptation Team. The goal is to deliver a flashable image of the OS that's fully usable as primary smartphone for developers/hackers.

Eklund wrote: "I am thrilled to announce a little thing we started at Nokia. Basically we want to have MeeGo running in N900 device, so that it's really usable as your daily development device. Basic Handset UX should work, phone calls, SMS, web browsing. Therefore we are concentrating on a few selected features and polish those to be "perfect". It might mean that we leave out some things in MeeGo 1.2 trunk for this edition, but that is not the default intention.

We are doing this fully on the open, and I hope this is an interesting project where we all in the community work towards the same goal: have a great MeeGo edition in the N900. This work is naturally based on the great work done already by N900 adaptation team.

The wiki is up here: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition. It will populated with more information as we go, thanks for the patience."

OK, so what does it actually mean? Well, change of plans, the N900 will eventually get kind of OFFICIAL MeeGo port. And that's a good news, at least for N900 owners. Still nothing that could be addressed to mass-market end-users, though.

What's somehow less exciting, however, is that it also probably means that launch of the actual MeeGo device (be it the rumoured N950 or whatever else) is actually... NOWHERE NEAR. If it was, Nokia most likely wouldn't be investing resources and creating a dedicated team to make a MeeGo development device out of the N900.

To recap, N900 users will get a MeeGo upgrade for their aging 1,5 years old hardware, but (at least not in the nearest future) not a new hardware to upgrade to, i.e. what's actually needed the most. And the MeeGo port will most probably be LESS functional than their current Maemo 5. And in such sense, while the efforts to push MeeGo development forward and bring it to kind of "production level" are highly appreciated, this announcement is actually as much disappointing as exciting. I bet that nine out of every ten N900 users would prefer to see an official upgrade to their current Maemo 5 platform in a form of (kind of) "Maemo 6" adding some missing features and improving the overall experience, or even just the same unchanged Maemo 5 on a new, powerful hardware that after 1,5 years is now so badly missing.

But OK, Nokia, most of us have learned that we need to be patient with you. So we warmly welcome and appreciate the MeeGo port for the N900, in hope that this time it's REALLY the promised last step before an actual, real MeeGo phone (kind of) announced just for this year, and that it will help bring it to us quicker and make it better. Just please don't disappoint us this time...