I’ve been seeing a lot of talk and getting a lot of questions about a possible Nokia / Intel / MeeGo phone that could be launched at MWC. Rumors center around the Nokia N9 which is a slider phone said to be running MeeGo and to be launched at MWC. While it might be launching, I doubt very much it’s got Intel inside.

I’ve already predicted 2012 for Intel/MeeGo smartphones because Moorestown’s 2-chip solution isn’t quite perfect for a high-end smartphone. Especially one with limited space for battery as in the slider design you see. I’ve also had private hands-on with MeeGo on Moorestown and seen the work that needs to be done on the MeeGo core before it’s ready. I doubt Nokia want to release another developer-focused ‘demonstrator’ phone in the way they did with the N900

Report: Timeline for MeeGo Devices

With Moorestown not quite right and MeeGo not quite ready, can you imagine the risk of Nokia would have to take showing a beta product or prototype based on MeeGo? No. Nokia and Intel will have agreed to make a splash with the first smartphone and I expect them to wait until later in the year.

Could the N9 be a MeeGo phone on a Ti platform? Yes. Ti were a Gold sponsor of the MeeGo conference in November.

Could we see it launched soon? I’m guessing May based on the fast that Nokia could be working with MeeGo 1.2 beta releases.

Will Nokia pre-announced the N9 at MWC? Assuming it’s a MeeGo product, I doubt it. Nokia have stated that they don’t want to ‘leak’ or preview devices any more.

And here’s another data point:

I spoke to Intel at the end of November about Moorestown and Medfield progress. Here’s what they said:

• Is Moorestown in full production now?
  Yes, Moorestown has been in production since we rolled it out in May 2010. Our tablet and smartphone customers are using the platform to build their own devices and this is the current focus on Moorestown.
• Target was 2010 for products, Why the delay?
  You can expect Moorestown based tablets in 1H’11 and smartphones later in the year.
• What operating systems options are you planning to offer for Moorestown?
  Moorestown supports both Android and MeeGo.
• Are you accelerating Medfield?
  Medfield is on track and scheduled to launch in 2011

There’s a hint of of a Moorestown smartphone in the answer to the first question but look at the timescales in question 2. ‘Later’ than 1H 11 sounds like 2H 2011 to me. If a Moorestown smartphone is going to happen, it’s not happening until the second half of the year. Medfield isn’t being accelerated as far as I can see based on the answer to the last question.

Finally, my native Finnish-speaking co-podcaster JKK of JKKMobile doesn’t read any solid fact in the Finnish article that started this rumor.

MWC is going to be big for Nokia and big for Intel. Look at the floor space that Intel have this year. Two booths, a Meego hospitality suite, the Wind-River subsidiary and a keynote with Paul Otellini. Rene James , head of the Software and Services Division says this:

There are things we’ll announce at Mobile World Congress that will shed a lot more light on why the value proposition [of MeeGo] makes a lot of sense for consumers and device manufacturers. [ref]

MWC will be all about software for Intel. AppUp on MeeGo. Tablet UI. Major ISV partners. MeeGo V1.2 beta announcement. Major brand joining the MeeGo partnership. All these things are more likely than the Nokia/Intel phone.

As for Intel hardware, expect to see tablets based on Moorestown running MeeGo 1.2 beta and Android. If that’s done right, it could be big enough news to keep the momentum going until later in the year.

Falling leaves, an Indian Summer and a brand new HP WebOS tablet. That’s the scene we could be seeing if the information coming via Engadget is correct. HP will have two WebOS tablets available in 7 and 9-inch variants called Opal and Topaz.

While we expected the HP WebOS Tablet project to hit in 2011, September seems a long way away and falls behind the early Honeycomb Android, further iOS and possible MeeGo tablets. The timing will give HP a chance to ramp up the developer community so we’re expecting SDKs to be out before summer. In order to attract those developers though, something special needs to be announced. WebOS and product renders just won’t be enough.

On that topic, I have a theory that I first mentioned in Dec 2010. [For the record – You know if it happens I’m going to be Mr Told-You-So! ] It’s based purely on the need to battle against Android and iOS that HP, Intel and Nokia could get together on this.

Qt has already been ported to WebOS, it made it to the WebOS 2.0 build and it makes the perfect layer for Symbian, MeeGo and WebOS to join forces in attracting critical development interested. Without that developer interest, what chance do these products have? Partnerships could be taken one step further too with Intel providing early Medfield samples and with Nokia providing Qt skills for the WebOS SDKs. Take it one step further and WebOS could actually be built on top of MeeGo. There’s nothing stopping HP doing this, even outside a partnership.

How about Intel and Nokia helping to combine Ares, the WebOS SDK, and QT as a multi-product SDK? I think developers would be very happy indeed. It will be just another SDK like the .net, AIR and JAVA environments that already exist. Intels AppUp back-end could be unified with the other applications stores too and combined (especially with tricks like Intel Insider that I hope make the jump to Atom) there’s a better chance of negotiating major video, tv, book, game and music deals. Wi-Di technology could also be a USP.

I’m not a professional software developer and I know that a lot of these thoughts are idealistic and totally ignore the difficult tasks of cutting deals but I can see that Qt could be one very important pivot-point and with three major brands behind a single core OS, MebOS?, there’s a better chance that the dev community could be ramped up quickly. I also love the idea of a Cute-Devices brand. Without a partnership of some sort, will Symbian, MeeGo and WebOS survive?

This is not the first time we’ve discussed the crossover between pro/productive/full-os mobility and the continuing threat/opportunities offered by mobile operating systems.

See: Mobile Changover What’s Your Plan? for more from June 2010.

CES 2011 was an absolute whirlwind of crossover products and after a week of note-taking, I’ve put together a report. Following the crossover theme, I’ve published it over at Carrypad!

Report: Mobile Computing at CES 2011 The X-Over Year

Don’t forget, Meet:Mobility Podcast 62 covers a lot of this ground too and includes perspectives from JKKMobile and Netbooknews.

We’ve just recorded Meet:Mobility Podcast 62. If you haven’t tuned in, please do because JKK, Sascha and myself spend a long time talking in detail about what happened in mobile computing at CES and give you a good overview of the significant products we got to understand while were in Las Vegas. For me, the show brought me the biggest signal yet that the X-over is happening. That’s X86 and ARM platforms crossing over in the mobile and personal computing space.

We’ve seen many indicators before now that ARM-derived processing platforms and operating systems were capable of personal computing tasks. I tested the Compaq Airlife almost  a year ago (Fully Reviewed in May) and the Tegra2-based Toshiba AC100 that I still have for testing is everything needed for a good smart-book / PC experience except the software build but there hasn’t been a time when so many top-tier manufacturers have shown the same confidence by bringing out multiple X-over products. In that respect, CES 2011 is a very important year and I do believe that we’ll look back and say, yes, that was the start of the crossover.

It will be a turbulent year or whirlwind activities. We’re rising out of a depression and there’s new confidence that risks can be taken. Many of the products we’re seeing won’t’ succeed either due to being too early or by being side-swiped by other disruptive products.

Tablets came-of-age at CES 2011. The rising quality of devices and the number of top tier brands shows that there’s a big enough level on investment now that the segment is unlikely to fail to produce multi-million sales. Estimates range up to 40m units for 2011 which will match netbook sales. I agree. 40m is achievable, especially as prices drop like a ton of bricks.

We’re not just talking about tablets though. There are a whole list of products we need to mention.

Motorola Atrix. Taking the prize for most-talked about device at CES is this dual-core Android phone with a big battery and lots of connectivity. The laptop ‘dock’ turned it into a desktop that made people stop and think. This idea of modular computing is exciting but there are lots of issues to consider. I have a Tegra 2 smart-book running Android and while it’s fun, it’s not productive. Processing power is short of what is needed and the apps are limited. Despite a full Firefox build being available on the Atrix, the limits I’ve experienced on the Toshiba AC100, will also apply to the Atrix until Honeycomb and a lot of ISV investment, solve the problem. I also imagine the cost of that set-up to be getting close to $800 or more. Who’s going to invest that much into a system that still won’t do 100% of personal computing activities? There’s also the issue of putting all your eggs in one basket. Smartphones have a tendency to get lost! The Atrix is a cool product and shows very clearly how desk-top computing will be possible with smartphone cores.

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. Like the Atrix, this is a device aiming to be more than one computing solution. Unlike the Atrix, this one offers the tablet as the screen and computing core with a docking keyboard finishing off the ‘smart book’ look. The smartphone ‘core’ isn’t so obvious and this isn’t a device aiming to be totally convergent. In fact, it feels to me like it fits in with it’s target audience in a more comfortable way than the Atrix. A consumer, coffee-table tablet with an optional keyboard for ‘getting things done’ sounds perfect for the iPad generation. With Android offering great in-cloud synchronisation, a two-device Android strategy could work well, especially as this product will get the important Honeycomb operating system update. [More info on the ASUS products at CES available here]

Gemtek. Highlighting the progress that Intel are making with their non-Windows platforms is the Gemtek Zeus. While the product is targeted as a media phone, it’s worth stopping for a moment to look at exactly what’s happening here. This is Android version 2.2 on an Intel Moorestown platform. That’s an official Intel Android build (that is likely to become an official branch of Android) optimised for Intels always-on platform. The product is light, is said to have good battery life. It highlights just how close ARM and Intel products are in the mobile space and this is just Intels first attempt!

OLPC XO-1.75 One Laptop Per Child product was another win for ARM this week. Starting with an AMD CPU and then moving to VIA, another X86 CPU, they have now switched over to a Marvel ARMADA 610 ARMv7 core for the XO-1.75 which should go into production in mid 2011. The difference in battery life is likely to be very significant because in the past, they were using relatively old X86 CPUs. Always-on, screen-off standby is also now possible. It will be important to see the performance too. Compared to the very old AMD Geode CPU that was used in the original, there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference at all and yet the power envelope has been cut from 5W to 2W! There’s an interesting video available on this here. OLPC CTO Edward J. McNierney says in the video that the performance is now better!

Honeycomb Finally, the gun has been fired for a true large-screen version of Android. This is likely to be a branch of Android that will run parallel to version 2.x but the important thing is that it signals Googles commitment which, in turn, with give ISVs the confidence to invest in larger Android application projects. Serious productivity apps, video editing and ‘HD’ versions of existing applications. Motorola and Nvidia were the big winners as they have been chosen to provide the reference hardware and product. Soon after the Xoom launches you can expect to see more Honeycomb product announcements that will roll in the second half of 2011.Finally, we could see a productive ‘smart’ book although don’t forget that Intel will also be involved here. Honeycomb on i86 is announcement I expect to hear about soon.

Windows and Office on RISC SOCs. This was a huge announcement that gives ARM partners a reason to take a Cortex A15 license if they haven’t done so already. I’m not expecting to see a mobile product drop out of Microsoft onto ARM but again, it gives ISVs reason to create ARM versions of applications. That effort could spill over into Honeycomb-related work too. Interestingly, it puts Adobe in a great position as a runtime that will work across all of these platforms and operating systems. They could find themselves being used as an important bridge. Timescales for Windows, timescales for drivers, timescales for ported software are all in the 2-5 year timeframe although X86 emulation could speed that up? Developers could be given virtual ARM SDKs to aid development work which would explain why Microsoft took a full ARM license this year.

One of the interesting things about Windows on ARM is that, finally, it will give everyone the ability to benchmark ARM against X86 in like-for-like products. My money is on Intel having the processing power advantage and ARM offering battery life and price advantages. Differences, however, are likely to be minimal and it could all be decided on value-add features like security, wireless integration and application stores. OEDs are the ones that will make the decision here.

Angry Birds on AppUp. Angry Birds migrated from ARM to X86 this week as Intel announced that the popular phone game was available on their AppUp store. That makes it available to some 100 million netbook and notebook customers and will have driven a large number of installations of the AppUp store that doesn’t yet come pre-installed on netbooks. Clearly Intel have bought-in the app to drive adoption but even so, it’s great to see and it won’t take many more of these wins before AppUp starts to drive its own adoption. Video demo here.

I was surprised not to hear any news concerning Windows 7 Compact. Microsoft still don’t have a consumer internet device operating system for the 4-10 inch segment. What’s going on there?

Intel’s Oaktrail surprised me at CES. I saw a number of WIndows-based products that were significantly smaller than I expected and had logner battery life than I expected. At least the claims of battery life seem to be good anyway. Viliv, a company that has both an ARM/Android and Intel Oaktrail/Windows product in the same 7 inch screen casing proved that parity has almost been reached. The X70 Slate is some 35% lighter than the previous model and even increases the battery life from 6 to 6.5hrs. I can’t wait to see the performance on both Intel and ARM versions. The Samsung Gloria/PC7/TX100 was also an interesting product in terms of technology, size and battery life on Intel. Ocosmos are also working on an Oaktrail device. It’s tiny!

Nvidia announced project ‘Denver’ which aims to bring ARM to the desk-top. [More info] I suspect this is a Cortex A15 project and won’t see the light of day until 2013 but once again, there’s the confidence and investment in a crossover product. These are hugely expensive projects so the message is clear now the risks are low enough and potential gains are high enough to get these projects underway.

Finally, there was another signal that crossover is starting to happen. I used a Galaxy Tab A LOT at CES. Wifi and 3G internet was hard to come-by but as my PIM, note-taking device, map and Twitter device it worked perfectly and preserved my phone battery , a Nokia N8, for photos and those voice-type things some people do! SMS were also handled on the N8. The netbook was with me most of the time and, like now, there’s no easier way to get a lot of text in a blog and video edited and posted. For bum-on-seat activities, I still need Windows but I surprised myself just how much I used the tablet. You’ll see me use it a lot more at MWC next month.

While ARM and Android is allowing designers to move mobile computing products into the personal computing space, Intel and Android are going in the other direction.

We’ve seen Android on X86 before and it doesn’t really impress when it’s on a standard PC platform with no always-on, GPS, 3G and market but when it’s shown on Moorestown, as it was last year at MWC, it’s another matter, especially when it’s Intel’s official build of Froyo for the Moorestown platform.  Here it is again in the Gemtek Zeus home tablet with an updated user interface. We weren’t able to get the full specs or even play around with this home phone/automation tablet but we did happen to bump into the product manager while we were filming. He says that the product is due in Q2 and after we had finished filming, revealed that they are also working on a MeeGo 1.2 product for later in the year.

Gallery.

Intel have scored a hit for their AppUp store. If you’ve got a netbook you can download it via the AppUp store. I’ve tested it and it’s working really nicely. I’ll be doing more ‘testing’ as soon as I can!

This is the sort of application that will start to attract attention for AppUp and while I suspect it was an Intel-supported port by Rovio, it won’t take too many of these before AppUp becomes a well-known and self-seeding product. The stats from this will be very interesting indeed. I’m sure Intel will be watching how many people download AppUp and keeping tabs on numbers from Rovio!

You can download AppUp and buy Angry Birds for your netbook here.

So here I am, in Las Vegas, stuck in a room testing games. Life’s hard!

Although Intels ‘Core’ products rarely reach down into our mobility segment here on UMPCPortal, I attended the launch of the second-gen Core CPUs at CES today to get some idea of what technologies could be coming down the road and how it might affect the positioning for Atom-based products.

Before the main announcements this morning though, Paul Otellini took a few minutes to talk about other products in the Intel portfolio. Two of those apply here.

Firstly, 100 new atom-based netbooks and tablets will launch in the first half of this year. Secondly, Paul announced that Meego and smartphone product announcements will be made at MWC in Barcelona. That’s in about 5 weeks.

The Core architecture of CPU+Graphics+Memory controller on one piece of silicon is being echoed in the Atom world and one of the main messages today was that on-chip graphics can be as good as discreet graphics and that over the last 4 years, the solutions have got 25x more powerful. Unfortunately we’re not told how much that affects power ratings. I have no details of the ultra-low power versions of these CPUs but there was no mention of this in the press conference so it’s probably fair to say that the first wave of 2nd-gen Core products won’t be anything for even high-end netbook, tablet or ultra mobile PC devices. The performance gap above Atom and below Core is getting very big now!

We saw an interesting content delivery product being announced today that could potentially make it to Atom. Intel Insider. This isn’t a store concept like AppUp but a silicon-based security solution that is giving film studios the confidence to deliver early release HD content to PCs. We already know that Atom is 1080p-capable so it would make a lot of sense to bring Intel Insider to Atom. It’s a closed-wall delivery mechanism which some people won’t like but it could help bring badly-needed content to Intel-based tablets and netbooks. We could potentially see the technology being used by AppUp too.

Wireless Display got a boost with the announcement of the 2nd generation of the product. It now includes 1080p support. I’m hoping that this reaches Atom platforms because cables and small, mobile devices don’t go together so in my opinion, Atom products need this technology more than the laptops and desktops.

The netbook and tablet platforms slipped behind a bit today leaving a huge gap in terms of performance. I hope we’ll hear something very soon that addresses this, especially at the performance end of the ultra-mobile market.

CES, the big consumer electronics show starts officially In just 4 days but for us, and you, it all kicks off tomorrow.

Not only am I flying out tomorrow for the first pre-events on the 4th but the PR companies will be back at work after the new year break so expect a lot of news as the scramble for the key stories begins. For the western world it’s an important show that will present company strategies that will play out as products during the rest of the year.

I’ve been kindly invited out to CES by Intel and will be bringing you not only their mobile hardware, OS and application news but lots of other news from CES too. There are meetings planned almost all the way through the 5th to the 8th so its going to be a busy one.

Sascha and JKK from the Meetmobility podcast will be there too and I expect there will be a party or two where we’ll get the chance to compare news with other bloggers and reporters.

As well as my reports, we have a team trying to keep up with all the news that comes in through other sources and as usual, we’ll be keeping focused on consumer internet devices on Carrypad and the more professionally-oriented mobile devices on UMPCPortal. I’m sure there will be a few crossover devices too. There will be videos and, when I get more time during the latter part of  the week, more analytical reports.

My reporting will rely heavily on the Galaxy Tab this year as I plan to tap out some quick posts to keep you all updated on the latest in Las Vegas but the Netbook (Gigabyte Touchnote) and smartphone (Nokia N8) will also play important roles. I had planned to take the video reporting up a notch to 480p but I haven’t been able to find a camera / Netbook combo that satisfies me yet. I want to keep it ultra-mobile as always so i’ll take my time to find the right equipment. I’ve written a few posts about my quest for new equipment over at my personal blog, Hiblue.

My Twitter account. @chippy will be a good place to see all the behind-the-scenes activity if you’re that way inclined.

Hope to have some good conversations with you all in the comments!

[This post written on the Galaxy Tab.]