Thursday, May 6, 2010

Maemo Meetup in Toronto

Last night, I attended the Mobile Geeks of Toronto (MGoTO) meetup. The featured guest was Samir Agarwal, head of Nokia's Maemo Operations in Mountain View, CA.

There were about 15 attendees, ranging from talk.maemo.org members, mobile enthusiasts, wireless carriers, and of course Howard Chui, of HowardForums fame.

I was in "EIPI-mode", and asked Samir some very pointed questions relating to Maemo/Meego. Some takeaways:

1. Nokia is commiting to the North American market with Meego
2. Meego devices from Nokia will be both mainstream and high-end in the hardware department.
3. Meego is not replacing Symbian
4. Samir would not answer if Nokia's Meego would have the 2-way pannable desktop, saying it may be damaging to his job if he answered! I am fairly certain that it will though based upon what we know of Harmattan.
5. Skype video coming to N900 .... It was demonstrated between Samir's N900 and his Booklet 3G.

Samir was asking for our feedback. I had my NA peeps in mind when I strongly said that Nokia must be committed to MeeGo's success in North America. Two things, IMO have been strikes against the N900 here in North America: 1) still being a geek device, and 2) choice of AWS HSPA bands which severely limit its adoption in 850/1900 land over here. If Nokia puts in the 5 band chip from the N8 in the first MeeGo device, it will go a long way to securing North American adoption, IMO.


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