As you probably know, Nokia currently uses the Symbian operating system on their smartphones, but they have a new OS being developed known as MeeGo which is a join venture between Nokia Maemo and Intel Moblin platforms.

According to an article over on Yahoo News by Keir Thomas, although MeeGo is still fairly young it is based on mature and established tech from way back in 2005, a tech names Maemo and since then Nokia has indicated that Maemo, and now MeeGo will be the future with their smartphone business.

However, according to Thomas, what Nokia needs right now is a “killer smartphone OS,” on handsets they are selling this festive season, which he says is “sure to go down in history as being the defining moment for smartphone sales.”

But, although “the revolution” is here, Nokia isn’t wholly present and until MeeGo can deliver the goods Nokia is unfortunately left with the Symbian OS which is rapidly aging and virtually at breaking point with Nokia’s most recent smartphone releases.

MeeGo is apparently scheduled to arrive mid-2011 on its first smartphone, Nokia boss Elop has also announced MeeGo would arrive in 2011 as reported (here). But by then Android and Apple’s iOS platforms will be well established if not already which will mean according to Thomas, “It’ll be game over for any other competitor because history has shown that most technology marketplaces only support two main players.”

Apparently the senior VP of Nokia Design, Marko Ahtisaari spoke on Meego and has said it will revolutionise smartphones and spoke of single handle handsets and that MeeGo will reduce the time a user stares at the display, which Thomas says sounds “like extremely characteristic open source waffle: lots of cool ideas, but essentially vaporous.”

He asks the questions “why isn’t MeeGo here right now? How close is it to release, and where are the phones that feature it?” Currently there is only one device that runs MeeGo and that is the Nokia N900 and even that isn’t official. You can check out a video of the Nokia N900 running MeeGo by hitting up (here)

So taking all this into consideration, is Thomas right in his appraisal of Nokia and the MeeGo operating system? Can Nokia MeeGo challenge the likes of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android or have they simply left it too late to bring MeeGo to the game?