The company promised support for Nokia N9 for a few years more

Jul 5, 2012 09:19 GMT  ·  By

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia appears to have almost completely buried one of its most popular projects, the MeeGo OS, which landed on shelves inside the highly-appealing Nokia N9 smartphone.

Ever since Nokia announced plans to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its primary mobile operating system for smartphones last year, MeeGo was expected to drown.

Apparently, it is right there, and this is why the company’s MeeGo development lead Sotiris Makyrgiannis has announced his leave from Nokia.

Along with him, some other members of the MeeGo team also announced plans to move away from the Finnish giant, although many of them will continue to work with the platform, it seems.

Some of these people will go to CloudBerryTec, where they will be able to build applications for the mobile operating system.

Nokia will continue to support MeeGo for a while, even for years, as it already promised, but the development of the platform appears to have reached a dead end.

Last year, the company lost some other employees who were sympathizing with MeeGo and who were not happy with Nokia’s decision to go with Windows Phone.

In fact, many other people also suggested that the company should have continued working on its own platforms, while adopting Google’s Android operating system.

Yet Nokia didn’t make such a move, although it did take into consideration the possibility. Windows Phone was a bigger bet, and it chose to place it, while striving hard to win.

Sales of Windows Phone devices have been slow so far, but the wide range of enhancements and new features that Windows Phone 8 Apollo is set bring along might change that. In fact, Microsoft’s OS is forecast to become the third leading mobile platform in the following quarters.

Thus, Nokia will have a lot to gain as a company, although MeeGo enthusiasts will still be left in the dark, even if they were blessed with no less than three major upgrades in the past nine months.

“After 12 years at #Nokia is time to say goodbye. Last day but I'm going knowing that we created a legendary phone #N9 and we tried hard,” Sotiris Makrygiannis said on Twitter. Nokia N9’s design was adopted for the Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 Windows Phones as well.