Intel shows MeeGo on netbooks and other devices

Intel took the opportunity at its Developer Forum held in Beijing to show off a first incarnation of MeeGo working on a netbook and across multiple devices. The mobile operating system is a collaboration between the world's largest chipmaker and Nokia that was first announced at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, combining their Linux-based Moblin and Maemo platforms.

MeeGo 1.0 boasts a rather clean and fresh user interface that uses tabs to house different zones, with quick and easy access to things like media, applications, contacts, instant messaging and real-time social networking updates. It's worth noting that this is Intel's take on the MeeGo UI so the overall look and feel here is essentially the same as Moblin. Nokia's will likely look much different but both are based on the Qt cross-platform application development framework.

The video above provided by Intel shows switching between applications and tabs is pretty fast -- at least on a 1.6GHz Atom netbook. MeeGo will also run on much smaller, less powerful devices but it doesn't seem to have many problems at that. The Linux-based OS was shown running on a netbook, a TV, a mobile phone and a kiosk, demonstrating how it can share media across gadgets, picking up video from one device and start playing where it left off on another.

The Linux-based OS will provide support for both ARM and x86 processors and have direct hooks into Intel's AppUp or Nokia's Ovi digital software store depending on the device in which it is running. MeeGo is due to ship in the second half of the year and will show up in the LG GW990 and Nokia N900 smartphones, with netbooks and others likely to follow.