It looks like Nokia has released PR1.3 for the N9 despite all the bad news from Nokia. After the Finnish company laid off some 10,000 employees last month, it was rumored that any future MeeGo updates would also be scrapped. It seems that despite all of the internal issues Nokia has, there are at least a few people left in the MeeGo department, at least for now. Rumor was that this update was in preparation for PR1.4, but all of that was before the layoffs.
Now all the rumors came true that this is the end of the road for the MeeGo team at Nokia, as Head of Development of MeeGo Sotiris Makrygiannis joined by other team members announced they are parting ways with the Espoo company
Those are the same people responsible for the birth of devices such as the N770, N800, N810, N900, N950 and, of course, the N9. Currently, there's a thread over at the Maemo forums, where people can say 'Thank you' and wish the team good luck in their future endeavors.
We were waiting for Intel and Samsung to come up with the first devices running on the MeeGo-based Tizen OS. but Here is a great piece of news for everyone who loves MeeGo. The Finnish startup Jolla Ltd. will develop smartphones running the Linux-based platform. More importantly however, Jolla will practically pick up the effort right from the point where Nokia left off - the newly formed company's core staff are the people who gave us the already iconic N9.
Marc Dillon is the Chief Operating Officer of Jolla Ltd. He has been with Nokia for almost eleven years. From January 2006 until his departure, he was the Principal Engineer for MeeGo at Nokia.
Quite naturally, we are eager to find out as much as possible about Jolla's future plans. c
Jolla said that it was licensing Nokia’s MeeGo patents but would build an entirely new UI using the Linux-based code. The company was started by former Nokia employees using their new “Bridge” program which helps groups at risk of getting fired start up something brand new.
Nokia has issued a statement pertaining to the licensing of patents to Jolla: “We’re proud of the support from our Bridge program to start-ups founded by former Nokia people, but we have not gifted Nokia patents to any of them, including Jolla. Jolla has said that it will sell new MeeGo-based smartphones with Jolla technology including its own brand new UI.”
We’re unsure of whether the company can find success in this competitive market, but their home country of Finland is likely to be more receptive than North America, certainly. We’ll follow this with interest as MeeGo has a lot of potential to be a powerful and successful mobile OS — it just needs to be marketed properly.
Source: www.gsmarena.com
