The In Depth Story of Meego (Part 2) & WP Transition/Lumia 800 production

We previously read an interesting article about the future/past of Meego and what happened behind the scenes before it was scrapped; titled as the In depth story of Meego/Maemo. Well part two has been published (in Finnish) and covers a wide range of topics, mostly the transition phase from Meego to WP and the production of the Lumia 800; Jippe was kind enough to translate/summarize some of the key points in our tips section so read those below.

Or if you like read the original Finnish article here: http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/nokia-meegon-tarinan-jalkeen-osa-2

– Searay was originally N9 version for Verizon (RM-716). It was changed to L800 after abandoning Meego. This was worked together with Qualcomm since Intel had not support for LTE.

(Remember the first Sear-Ray unveiling? By Elop to the press where he said “No Pictures”- taking a second look at it it doesn’t seem to have any of the WP buttons on the bottom of the screen which might help support the fact that it was based directly off the N9 with minimal change)

– Verizon N9 was designed around Qualcomm Snapdragon system and they were already working on hardware adaptation.
– It was easy to change the Verizon N9 after Feb’11 to WP since they were running the same Snapdragon system on a chip.
– That is the reason, why Elop can boast the speed of creating L800, it was mostly ready by then and he was able to show it just days after the launch of N9.
– The challenge in Intel partnership was that their chip was power consumption. (as it is widely known). LG had a device running on intel chi and had planned to install Meego on it, but decided against it Spring 2010.
– Nokia has several tablet on the drawing board and the Senna code named device – that was mentioned in the previous article – was the most ready. Ceberus was the most interesting of those tablets (http://plaza.fi/s/f/editor/images/X-2013010312510196565.jpg) It was scrapped since it was thought that developers would not be interested. Qualcomm had patented the device in the picture while they were cooperating with Nokia on N9 hw adaptation.
– Nokia also had e-ink devices on the drawing board. Those were scrapped quickly
– Ditching Meego was done in a very small group of people. LG was given no importance during the decision even though they were interested in adopting Meego. Samsung was approached, but according to one source, Samsung was never given real option to give final answer before moving on to WP.
– Carriers were thought to be the biggest opponents to moving on to Meego.
– Total chaos around ecosystem and developer relations. Ovi Store was worried that there should be sufficient amount of apps available for Meego. The plans kept on changing and decision had to be done in the wild.
– Target segments and key features of Meego devices kept on changing through time. In one meeting something was decided and in the next meeting everything was changed. Developers were unaware what was expected and which application should be developed. The pressure to have huge amount of apps during launch was heavy.
– Meego also had an impact to Symbian development. One day it was said that Meego and Symbian would have same UI/UX, the next day it was said that they should be different. Information exchange did not work over the organizational silos and common meetings were canceled often. As an example, a person working on Symbian told that they tried to find info on Meego UI from sites like TechCrunch.
– Alongside Meego development of Meltemi took place from 2010 to 2012. One of the planned names was Meego lite, but it was never decided upon.
– Meltemi was supposed to be 100% compatible with Meego. The goals were:
– To get it run on low specced devices
– To have UI to run on 60FPS throughout the UI
– To start app in one second
– To manage data in one database so that a lot of information could be retrieved at once (would allow nice hubs similar to WP)

– There were massive trouble related to everything: database, firmware versions, functionalities, new chip… According to their sources, Meltemi was not ready to ship.

They might be publishing more info on Meltemi later in 2013.

Thanks for the tip-off/Translation jippe !

Category: Lumia, MeeGo, Nokia, Symbian, Windows Phone