I'm participating in the
MeeGo Summit FI that starts tomorrow, and I'm already in Tampere now, as you can see. The summit is at an interesting time, given that there is a huge amount of stuff happening around MeeGo while at the same time
Nokia is balancing on what do both in the far future and what to do to ship the
MeeGo device they've already promised. The summit is fully and overly booked for >300 attendees. There is also
Finhack free software event happening alongside on Saturday at the same venue.
The company I work for,
Nomovok's CEO
illustrated the MeeGo situation extraordinarily well a little less than two months ago. I think it's one of the best insights you can get from anywhere in public at the moment. Now things are starting to really heat up. Of course the Big thing is the
MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in the end of May, but it takes nothing away from this being the major event both in the country formerly known as NokiaLandia, and also globally given the amount of MeeGo related talent here. Nomovok is
teasing people with the SteelRat - a launchpad for MeeGo tablet creation and an UX, based on latest MeeGo Core - a beta of which will be available now in Tampere and first version in San Fransisco. Meanwhile we and others are investing in also the
MeeGo IVI and
MeeGo TV platforms, not forgetting about the handset industry that is more visible to many tech savvy consumers.
At the same time there is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the
Ubuntu project (Ubuntu 11.04 upcoming, I'm already using it and reporting bugs), together with
Linaro and other ARM players. As a founder of
Ubuntu Finland I'm always eager to see if I can work there also on work time, not only on free time. And regarding ARM, Nomovok is the key player in having ARM on MeeGo as well.
Then on the completely other end of spectrum, I'm eagerly waiting for
the GTA04 project to have my
Neo FreeRunner(s) bumped up to modern specs. At the end of the day I'm still using over 2,5 year old phone myself, since I want to run the software that is both free and completely selected (and if I want, done) by me. With GTA04, I could choose between
MeeGo armv7hl port,
Debian armhf port or Ubuntu as the base distribution to use my software.