I had the opportunity to play with MeeGo for Handsets 1.1 and the upcoming 1.2 in December of last year on a Nokia N900. I very much felt reminded of Openmoko before I had joined them. There were a lot of promises, dreams but the reality looked differently. The Handset 1.1 release was not working at all besides being very slow the xterm and the window manager couldn’t quiet agree, the pre releases of 1.2 worked a bit better but is still far away from being usable. The SDK situation is not much better. The madde approach is very promising, the tools to recreate the SDK actually work but the Qt installation is different depending on if you are using the X86 or the ARM SDK. E.g. the WebKit headers are only in the X86 SDK but were not in the ARM SDK. The reason is that both SDK package descriptions are in different files and they do not get synced.

Nokia announced today to enter a strategic partnership with one of the biggest software companies in the world, Microsoft. I am glad Nokia doesn’t try to turn Symbian into a real operating system, I understand that with throwing out the GTK+ platform and restarting with Qt MeeGo is not close to challenge Android/iPhone. Nokia has missed out on purchasing WebOS from Palm and the best alternative is really to go with Microsoft Windows 7 Phone. On the other hand it is scary that Windows 7 Phone is the best alternative.