Nokia and Intel to merge
Theo Boshoff
Possibly the biggest news on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is that of Nokia and Intel joining forces, with plans to fuse their respective open-source operating systems.

The move is motivated by the increasing competition from cellphone industry newcomers Google and Apple.

Plans are to merge the Nokia Linux-based Maemo software, first released for the company’s N900 device, with Intel’s Linux-based Moblin OS for smartphones and possibly netbooks and tablet PCs too.
The competition is starting to hot up in the mobile OS space, with Google’s Android making huge inroads into the market and Apple doing their thing.

It seems that this move might not only be about operating systems, as the possibility exists that we might be seeing Intel chips featuring in Nokia phones in the future. This is all speculation, of course.

The new platform is said to be called Meego and will be hosted by The Linux Foundation.
Questions abound on what is to happen with Symbian. In the techie fraternity, it has long been discussed that Symbian is losing ground fast against newer open source developments, but Nokia says most of its smartphones will be Symbian-based and that the new MeeGo platform will only be implemented on its most advanced smartphone models.

What is certain is that the mobile operating system war is squarely on, as more and more companies are introducing their own operating systems, each believing theirs to be the best.