Yesterday Intel and Nokia announced the merging of their two linux based mobile projects, Moblin and Maemo. This has certainly got a lot of people talking in the maemo community, but with little extended detail about the project a lot of assumptions are being made and some people are getting quite worked up.

Ari Jaaksi (head of maemo at Nokia) has posted some interesting bits of info. More details here at the Symbian Blog.

So basic info seems to be:

• MeeGo aimed at more devices than just phone (TVs, netbooks, etc)
• UI will be QT based, like Maemo 6
• Packaging system will be RPM, unlike DEB in Maemo
• Version 1 expected Q2 2010
• Will “build upon” the Moblin core software platform
• Will support both ARM and X86

The first question that’s raised is what happens to the Maemo community? Whilst those whose main interests are Maemo 5 and 6 may well switch there are many people who still support the older N770 and N8x0 tablets with the older versions of Maemo. Also it’s not yet known if the N900 will be officially supported or if it will need community effort to get MeeGo (or Maemo 6) onto it. From the Ari’s posts it seems if you’re developing for Maemo 5 in QT then your apps will work on MeeGo. Also it seems the contracts of the maemo community members paid by Nokia have been extended. So it looks like support of Maemo 5 is fairly safe during the lifetime of the N900.

The next question is, what happens to Maemo 6? On first hearing the news I figured this meant it would not get the chance to advance from Maemo 5 because of all the time involved with the merger. However something Ari said has proved quite interesting, “Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible…..consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance”. This seems to imply that Maemo 6 has already under gone the merger work with Moblin and is already a version of what would be called MeeGo. Considering that Nokia and Intel first announced plans to cooperate back in June 2009 this could mean a lot of the work required for the merger of the two systems has already been done.

Anyway, enough with the speculation. I think for now it’s best to sit back and wait for the news to come in over the next few weeks rather than getting too worked up over rumours and assumptions.

Interesting times lie ahead.

Update: Another interesting announcement yesterday was the release of the Maemo 6 UI Framework, screenshots here.

Update 2: Quim Gill gives away some details of how this affects Maemo 6. Maemo 6 will be renamed, however it is not a full MeeGo product. Seems what I assumed earlier wasn’t correct.

Update 3: Anyone worried about Nokia support for N900 should feel slightly better today, minor firmware release (PR1.1.1) is out. This should pave the way for the next major release (PR1.2) due in the next few weeks. So far those who have upgraded report performance improvements. No offical changelog yet.