Rather weirdly just after we heard that the MeeGo operating system was not quite dead and buried and that an update was being pushed out to the Nokia N9 we’re now hearing even bigger news about MeeGo. It appears that a start-up company consisting of former Nokia employees is planning to enter the smartphone world with a new phone running on MeeGo and we wonder if this can possibly be a sustainable business.
Jolla Ltd. is a new Finnish business and plans to invigorate Nokia and Intel-created MeeGo for its own devices, the first of which is to be released later this year. Despite the total dominance of the big players such as Samsung and Apple in the smartphone world, this doesn’t appear to deter newcomers to the market as we’ve recently seen with Amazon’s plans to bring out a smartphone. However Amazon has a mighty ecosystem already in place so it does seem more remarkable that a start-up would attempt to enter the same saturated smartphone market.
MeeGo is a Linus-based operating system and the only smartphone it has been used in so far is the Nokia N9 so although it has been used in notebooks and infotainment systems it has not exactly taken smartphones by storm. After being dropped by Nokia in favor of the Windows Phone OS it seems that the former Nokia employees that have formed Jolla Ltd see more potential in MeeGo. A Jolla statement tells how the company has been formed by ex-directors and professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 setup, along with those who have worked on MeeGo in communities, according to Reuters.
Jolla hopes to have its first MeeGo phone ready to reveal later this year with the help of private investors and partners. The company is currently placing its focus on design, development and marketing the new MeeGo smartphone but analysts feel the company could struggle to create a sustainable business in such a competitive market. The challenge will be to do this rather than come up with just one cool phone, as expressed by John Strand of Strand Consult, a Danish telecoms consultancy.
We’d like to hear your thoughts on a new MeeGo phone from the Jolla startup. Do you think any company that isn’t a major player has any hope of making an impact on the smartphone market? Do you think using MeeGo is a positive move on Jolla’s part and is there any chance that Jolla could prove the analysts wrong and establish a sustainable business? Send your comments to let us know.