LG signs on to help make MeeGo for phones

MeeGo working group member Valtteri Halla on Friday said LG had picked up some of the slack in MeeGo phone development after Nokia relegated the OS to an experimental project. The Korean company had joined a coalition including carrier giant China Mobile as well as ZTE and others. Nokia's partial exit was "opening opportunities" for other firms to come in now that it wasn't dominated by one main company, he said.

Halla expected the first fruits of the group to come out in 2011, "pretty soon," but didn't say from whom.

Nokia had co-developed the OS with Intel but had difficulty getting it adapted to phones. Most MeeGo devices, like the WeTab, were tablets or netbooks rather than mobile devices. The phone aspects have faced delayed development and won't be ready until later this year at the earliest.

LG was one of the earliest to pledge itself to MeeGo and unveiled the GW990 early last year with the full intention of shipping it before 2011. The company cancelled the phone quickly, however, and pretended it was a concept that it never had plans to make. The change of heart was never explained but was likely due to the absence of both a suitably low-power processor and the beliefs that MeeGo wouldn't be ready for phones that year.

By Electronista Staff