MeeGo was a Linux-based collaboration between Nokia and Intel in the mobile OS space. No-one really knows what happened with that project, as no single MeeGo device is out in the market till date. No; the Nokia N9 is not MeeGo. It is just branded MeeGo.
Anyway, Nokia pulled out, Samsung jumped in with intel and a couple of others – and the platform got the new name Tizen OS. I don’t know about the name though. It sounds…. sigh.
Anyway, before that time, Samsung had been working on Bada as a mobile OS for low and medium end devices. Baba has done fairly well with a number of devices numbering over a million in the market till date.
However, from this year, Bada is to be merged into Tizen by Samsung. Samsung has promised that the current Bada applications and the SDK will be backward compatible with the new OS.
Tizen’s development environment will be largely based on HTML5 which is rapidly becoming the preferred development environment for mobile apps and services.
Apparently, Samsung intends to continue their multi-platform strategy, supporting Android, Windows Phone and Tizen OS platforms in their different range of mobile products.
A number of Tizen OS smartphones are expected from Samsung this year. Now, that’s fast. Why was MeeGo development so slow? Why did it take nokia so long to produce a MeeGo phone – and then it turns out that it is not actually MeeGo, but Maemo/Harmattan?
Will we ever have answers? But then, does it really matter anymore? Life goes on.