For those who haven’t heard, Jolla is a startup that aims to finally deliver on the promise of a MeeGo-based phone. The company was started by former Nokia employees. MeeGo was to be Nokia and Intel’s OS of choice for a range of devices from mobile phones, and tablets to TVs and IVI systems.
Unfortunately, Nokia abandoned MeeGo and is abandoning Symbian in favour of Windows Phone, which left this perfectly-capable mobile OS without a phone to run on. The only phone to ship with MeeGo by default is the Nokia N9.
In a recent interview, the CEO of Jolla, Jussi Hurmola mentioned that they would include support for running Android applications on their MeeGo-based phones. Since Android apps run on a VM (Dalvik), it is quite possible for platforms to include support for running Android apps by simply including the Android VM with their platform.
Jolla will be using OpenMobile’s ACL for running Android applications. While Jolla’s OS will be built on MeeGo, it will not use the UI developed by Nokia for their N9 product, rather they are developing their own UI which hasn’t been showcased as of yet. They are also working with the open source community, which has been actively updating MeeGo even after Nokia gave up on it. The community-developed Mer project is the result of that effort and it already supports Qt and HTML5 apps. Nokia already put in a lot of effort into making Qt mobile capable.
With support for Android apps as well, MeeGo has quite a boost, which will hopefully be enough to bootstrap the device.
