There are still a ton of geeks and true power users who refuse to give up their precious N900, and I don’t blame them. It’s an extremely powerful device and has a great UI. The amount of tweaking and customizations that can be done is astonishing. I’d be a N900 fanatic if it wasn’t for a few nagging problems that I just couldn’t get past, as mentioned in my N900 review. People who still have their N900 will be happy to hear that MeeGo is semi-officially coming to the N900. Two days ago Harri Hakulinen from the Meego team announced the good news on MeeGo’s official blog. Here is a clip of the article…

Hello aMeeGos,

After many busy months of MeeGo development, we have finally come to a stage that justifies proud blogging around our MeeGo for N900 adaptation project. As you may already suspect, or have heard from IRC or discussion forums, we now have 3G audio call functionality with proper ofono signaling and pulse audio stack working on N900, including our brand new open source modem adaptation for N900!

That’s not to say it will be a smooth experience or have all the features to make it usable as your main OS right off the bat. But as more updates are released, the more stable it should become.

At this point, I need to remind you about the basics: MeeGo is an open source project and if you choose to install the MeeGo image to your N900 device, you do it completely at your own risk. If you are not confident that you know what you are doing with it and why, please don’t use it at all. Especially now, if you start playing with call software under development, you need to watch after your phone bill, as well. Also, please use the latest repositories only, or the next weekly image that is downloadable from the MeeGo repositories every Monday.

That takes us to the second part of the news….

N900 PR1.3 Firmware Coming – Dual Boot Between Maemo and MeeGo On N900

I can’t tell you how happy I am to see that you’ll be able to easily dual boot between Maemo and MeeGo in the next N900 firmwmare update. This was a good move by Nokia/Maemo/MeeGo – whoever was mostly responsible for this – to keep N900 users happy and helpful during the ongoing development of MeeGo.  I’ve seen plenty of tweets from mobile fanatics in the past few days declaring that they’ll either keep their N900 longer or buy another just because of this latest announcement. Hardcore Maemo/MeeGo followers might not find this news interesting at all. They expected a dual boot solution or knew it was coming months back. But I can’t tell you how many people have asked me the big question – “Is MeeGo coming to the N900?”. There wasn’t much about PR 1.3 in the article I linked to above, but in case you want to know – here is what Harri mentioned…

On the Maemo side, there have been interesting, supporting developments going on, as well. The PR 1.3 update is quite close now, and with that you can easily dual boot between Maemo and MeeGo on your N900. There is also a possibility of developing applications supporting both operating systems, based on Qt and Qt Mobility APIs on the Maemo side. It means that you can develop once in PC with Qt Creator, and test your applications on both Maemo and MeeGo, directly on your N900 device!

Besides the dual boot option there are a few more known updates coming in PR 1.3. Simon, our Maemo/MeeGo expert, covered this over at Maemo Fanatics yesterday. Simon says,

In addition to numerous bugfixes and enhancements to Maemo 5, PR1.3 will bring the *much requested* demand for kexec kernel support, this is literally kernel-execution and allows instantaneous “live” kernel loading and overwriting. So, it means multiboot. It means MeeGo, it means Android and it even means other alternative platforms for the N900, such as SHR OS.

The first part is beyond me, but it’s exciting to see the possibility of dual boot between Android and other operating systems besides MeeGo & Maemo. We’ll have wait to until the firmware hits N900s world-wide to get more information on PR 1.3. Follow our twitter account @thefanaticsmob for all the latest updates on this story.
Want to learn more about MeeGo on the N900? Click here for Meego’s official wiki page.

Update: I just came across this post by Mark from The Nokia Blog. Apparently “MeeGo on the N900″ is only intended for developers, although I’m sure it won’t be too hard for N900 users to figure out how to get it running. Should be a fun challenge for everyone. Just don’t brick your phone! EverythingBlaxx is still overworked.

Mike Macias has written 297 articles for The Mobile Fanatics.

Mike is the editor-in-chief of The Mobile Fanatics. Contact him via email or at his twitter page.

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