MeeGo Powered In-Vehicle Information System Makes Appearance at MWC 2011

While Nokia was pretty clear that from this point forth it doesn't want MeeGo to come anywhere their smartphones, other companies are a lot more eager to use this operating system for their devices, and one such company is Hawtai which has incorporated a MeeGo-based in-vehicle information (IVI) system in one of their latest car models.

The system was showcased at the 2011 World Mobile Conference which takes place right now in Barcelona, Spain, and we got to witness its power first hand.

The unit on display was running a MeeGo version built especially for this role and it features an 8-inch 4-wire resistive touchscreen display with an 800x600 resolution, 300:1 contrast ratio and 300cd/m2 brightness.

On the inside, the vehicle information system was running an Intel Atom CPU on top of a 945 GSE northbridge and ICH-M southbridge mainboard.

Although no details were provided regarding the specs of the Atom chip installed, it is highly probable that this is actually an embedded Atom core.

Right now, Intel builds a wide range of embedded Atom CPUs, ranging in speed from 600MHz to 1.8GHz, some of them even featuring dual processing cores and Hyper-Threading support, among other options.

In addition, the IVI system also featured a built-in 8G solid state disk, which was specially designed to withstand the demanding conditions encountered while running in a vehicle environment, as well as a 3G modem and a GPS navigation device.

The rest of the specs list featured more mundane options such as a 4-channel Hi-Fi amplifier (4x45W), AM/FM radio, Bluetooth 2.0 and optional CMMB digital TV tuner.

Besides its navigation and information functions, the system also allows for music and movie playback.

This new MeeGo system will be available in the Hawtai B11 mod level sedan which was launched in the third quarter of 2010.



Note: Fellow editors Cosmin Vasile and Alex Vochin are on the floor at the 2011 Mobile World Congress and are keeping us posted with pictures and live reports on the latest product previews and launches.