Meego OS emerging as an allrounder, will also work on Laptops and Desktops

According to a report by IDG, Intel has finally revealed that they are developing versions of Meego OS that will run on conventional laptops and desktops. This will be an interesting turn for this Linux-based OS which is already planning to come up as a vendor free open source Mobile platform.

Meego OS, the result of grand merging of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, is emerging as a complete all round OS for various tech gadgets. The first editions released in March were for netbooks and Nokia's N900 smartphone and now "Beyond netbooks and smartphones, the company is also focusing Meego development around entry-level desktops with Intel's Atom processors", said Doug Fisher, vice president of the software and services group at Intel.

Basically, Intel is working on different editions of Meego OS for smartphones, netbooks and PCs. The reason for these three different editions are due to different user experiences. This difference in user experience is due to different user interfaces and processors in them e.g the user interface i.e. the screen in smarphones, netbooks and PCs are different, said Fisher.

The Meego edition for handset devices is scheduled to be released in October this year. The netbook edition is also expected in the second half of this year. Fisher didn't mention anything about the date for Desktop edition.

But Meego OS seems to have competition everywhere - Android is already a pretty successful open source platform for smartphones, Linux based distros - Ubuntu, Fedora already have a good grip as an opensource Desktop OS, pretty good OS for netbooks too - Google's ChromeOS, Ubuntu netbook edition.

But Fisher doesn't take them as a competitior. According to him, Intel's competition comes from ARM(due to the upcoming Intel's Moorestown chips for smarphones, which are currently using ARM processors). And Intel's main goal is not to make it work on all devices but to ensure that the device works with Intel architecture. In his words, "We want to ensure that it has an optimized operating environment".