MeeGo for Handsets Makes Its First Appearance

This is one of the most important milestones for MeeGo enthusiasts out there, as the MeeGo project has just announced the availability of the handset baseline source code for the operating system. Dubbed MeeGo 1.1, the operating system is expected to become available sometime in October, and should start seeing weekly builds pretty soon, as the development team is currently working on MeeGo Gitorious, which should include all the necessary sources and infrastructure for the release of those builds.

Along with announcing the “'Day 1' of the MeeGo Handset user experience project,” the MeeGo project also announced that the team in charge with the MeeGo UI has been hard at work with the handset reference user experience, and that it came up with the MeeGo UI design principles and interaction guidelines. The merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms can be considered complete now, as architecture decisions and technical selections have been determined. Moreover, the MeeGo Build Infrastructure was also announced as being open.

According to the MeeGo devs, the MeeGo Project Handset Day 1 includes:
- MeeGo APIs, incorporating Qt and MeeGo Touch UI Framework (MTF)
- Subset of the handset reference UI and applications
   -Status Bar: clock, network, Bluetooth, 3G connection, notifications, and battery charge
   -Home Screen
   -Lock Screen
   -Application Launcher
   -Virtual Keyboard
   -Applications: Dialer, SMS, Browser, Contacts, and Photo Viewer
- MeeGo Core OS (including the middleware components)
- Hardware adaptation support for Intel Atom-based handset (Moorestown) and ARM-based Nokia N900

The development team made available for download a developer preview image of MeeGo, as well as the source code, enabling those interested in the operating system to have a closer look at it. It should be noted that the MeeGo Handset Day 1 image is only a community developer preview for the time being, and that its installation on one's “primary handset” is not recommended. Additional details on what MeeGo on mobile phones is all about can be extracted from the video below, as well as from the screenshots available here.