'We'll launch multiple MeeGo device by end of year,' states Orange

Having only been announced at MWC last month, Orange has declared that it would launch smartphones, tablets and netbooks using Intel and Nokia's MeeGo Linux platform by the end of the year.

To help meet this challenging timescale, Orange has struck a deal with Intel to develop multimedia services for the MeeGo platform that would see the two firms working together on services such as Orange TV and Orange Maps, making sure they run in the MeeGo environment across different device types and screen sizes.

"Seventy-five per cent of our customer base has yet to embrace the mobile internet," said Orange devices chief, Yves Maitre. "With the increasing number of phones and operating systems for customers to choose from, it is our role to make sure their journey into this richer mobile multimedia environment is simple and easy."

While the possible developers of these MeeGo devices was not revealed, Orange said they would become available ‘towards the end of the fourth quarter' of this year.

Separately, the head of Nokia's MeeGo marketing efforts, Peter Schneider, has been attempting to clarify the position of the new platform in relation to the Symbian OS. "We see Symbian and MeeGo as being quite separate. Symbian is strong...and will continue to have success on smartphones. MeeGo covers a different market. MeeGo is a new operating system, while Symbian is well developed."

Schneider added that MeeGo "doesn't compete" with smartphone operating systems such as Android or Windows Phone 7 Series. Instead, it's more likely to be compared to Chrome OS when that hits the streets later in the year.

At the launch of MeeGo, Nokia's VP for devices, Kai Oistamo, said that "the two operating systems would co-exist" and that MeeGo would run on "multiple processor architectures."

Symbian has been working for some years on making its OS work with devices having multiple processors and considered it had a lead in this area of handset technology.

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