MeeGo becomes infotainment operating system of choice for BMW, GM, Hyundai and more
By Sean Hollister 
posted July 26th 2010 5:36AM
posted July 26th 2010 5:36AM
posted July 26th 2010 5:36AM
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MeeGO FTW!
Why is there a mercedes in the picture?
@gargle good question.
@gargle cuz it's about to be acquired by Hyundai
@calagan WTF??????? i know hyundai is doing good lately but control it boy, this sentence seems grammatically wrong on the paper, hyundai to buy daimler, what next? htc buys nokia
@GeceBekcisi
Beegoo!
@arash I think you have grammar and intuition confused.
@arash I wouldn't be surprised if HTC bought Nokia someday. Nokia is going downhill, HTC is rising. HTC (which I'm not a fan of personally, but I do respect what they've done) is doing quite well with a lot of new phones that people want.
Nokia on the otherhand is the phone version of Yahoo.
@CodyTech You Americans have no idea what Nokia is like in the rest of the world.
@CodyTech
That's what some people like you said about Apple too, 15 years ago.
@GeceBekcisi
hmm.....Looks like Android is losing the battle of the IVI/Head Unit. They started off with a lot of promise but I wonder where Google went wrong coz they have a dedicated automotive division just like Microsoft. Might be that they gave too much of a perception of being hands-off on Android and giving an impression that it is truly open source and everything is decided by the OHA committee when in reality it is not. Car manufacturers hate democratic free-wheeling systems (with good reason though).
Imagine a Meego powering a Yugo. :)
@Inzain ...or a Lada.
@Inzain
Toheil.
Swiftly.
2.
@Inzain
Yugo ftw.
@C72
Yugo FTW x2 :D
noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!
so what does mercedes have to do with that?
wat
Meego fast in my automobile
very cool
Ha! The power of two great power houses in tech "Intel & Nokia". Meego FTMFW
Well if this helps application development of MeeGo I'll be happy.
It looks like a good OS, and combined with the N series it should be a winner. The only thing it doesn't have is the wide app selection that Android and Apple have.
This is going to get very ugly. We can't have android, iOS, WM7 and Meego all happily living together with different app programming languages. Someone's gotta go or someone has to allow their competitors apps on their phones.
My guess? Android apps on Meego or vice versa
Nothing is stopping the developer developing for more than one of d platforms(if the needs arises). Smartphones maybe very popular right now but the feature phone market is still very large in the western markets which implies that Smartphones(old timers & new timers) still have so many untapped markets.
Choice and competition FTW!
@garionw How about the fact that MeeGo is Linux and inherits all of the apps that run on Linux. Who wins now?
@garionw
It should be relatively (!) easy to port Dalvik to MeeGo or Qt to Android.
Apple will always sit in its own little walled garden though. :)
@garionw That's where Qt comes in. Easy to dev, easy to port. And don't worry, competition is gonna get stupid-hectic around the end of this year, but if there's one thing developers love doing, it's developing. I expect MeeGo (as well as WP7) to have a decent amount of apps at primetime.
@garionw
meego should be able to run most of the 13,000 current symbian apps when it comes out , plus with qt all future symbian apps will run on meego , porting to qt from android apps is also not very difficult,
So i can see meego building up a decent amount of apps in a very fast time hopefully.
@IMarius I hope so. My Android phone is nice, but I expect Meego to be much much better.
Out of all mentionend Car manufacturers, you chose a picture from Mercedes, one of those that aren't part of the alliance...
sometimes i wonder...
Oh man that is going to be so awesome. A car that can communicate with your laptop or phone, and even network with your home. MeeGo is really going to rocket Linux to the consumers.
Yeah that's what i wanna see for MeeGo.
Netbook, tablet and phone UX having example deep sync possibilities like example syncing all the music and setting over. Something that we are now seeing with some of the desktop linux distros.
@sirebral
I can see it now...AMD and Nvidia are drooling at the idea that Intel is taking its eye off the ball and dedicating resources to yet another failed product.
@MikeSL As much as i'm a fan of open source(not googled open source thought) i just don't see that bright future for meego. yeah nokia and intel are big, both in hardware, and meego seems heavy to me. did you see the developer preview of meego on the phone? in that stage they still had the mouse pointer on the screen, showing the roots, too bad we don't have any good media interface in our cars yet(maybe audi MMI is good but its not that powerful as an os)
@gerrrg yeah, that's why Intel had record setting profits ... failed projects. Good looking out dude.
@arash Well, you just said "developers' preview" .. nothing set in stone, alot of changes will be made until October .. we are yet to see how the final product will be .. this is just a first look!
@arash
its seems heavy ? it true linux based OS making meego extremely light , remember its a full OS unlike other smartphone one , making it closer to the likes of windows.
And why does it matter that they had a mouse pointer on the screen , plus maybe you where confused the preview your taking about was just a framework example and kick start for one device , not a proper version of Meego on a phone.
Yet another OS to handle, but for my car? Doesn't sound that great to me. Things should be moving towards one device with multiple docks, imho.
@TheAmazingWJV Yeah, why they couldn't let the cars remain manual.
@TheAmazingWJV
and towards one single tire model too.
Awesome news!
GM+BMW+PSA that's support !
For those who's asking Mercedes Benz in on the photo... here
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/21/nokia-partners-with-european-automotive-powerhouses-for-in-car-a/
Does this system bring automatic braking with it? Where is the brake pedal on that Beemer?
@TimmyRaa If you need a brake in a beemer, you blew it
@TimmyRaa Ahh, so that's why there's alway a BMW 2 inches off my bumper. They are all base spec ones that didn't have the Braking pack fitted. I also note that many of these same ones also miss the Indicator pack as well.
@TimmyRaa With the exception of the new M3 GTS, BMW is known for having terrible brakes. Its their infamous weakness.
I hope now BMW makes their navigation interface better. Their current one is horrible versus the competition.
The only issue I have with this is my fear that at some point in the future these companies are going to make it so that attaching your music player/phone is not going to be easy (or maybe not possible at all) unless you run the same OS as the car itself.
I rather have all the "brains" be on MY device, not in the car. All I want the car for is the hardware buttons which would make it easy to change stations and other settings. My phone or MP3 player can be updated way the hell easier and cheaper than a car's entertainment system which I fear would be out-of-date before you even buy the car.
@Hazdaz It's in their interest for everything to be easy to sync for you, regardless of your preferred ecosystem. So I wouldn't worry.
And there are a ton of good reasons for cars to get more sophisticated software over time. Like real-time component wear warnings, et al.
@thanksbetotap
While I agree it would be in their best interests, that is not always the way some of these companies work - they like to push their own products even that means crippling any other devices you hook up to it.
Also I have nothing against more computing power when it comes to the automotive (engine, transmission, etc) side, but the simple fact is that no car company is ever going to be able to keep up with the rate of change in the smartphone work.
As an example, within one model year Android phones have 2X in speed and gained many more features. No car company (or even their suppliers) would be able to keep up with that. And imagine what will happen 3 or 4 or even 10 years down the line? The infotainment hardware in these cars is going to be ancient, even if the car itself might be perfectly fine.
Better to just let the driver supply their own infotainment source and just use the car's hardware to play it on (like the car's speakers and if it had a screen, mirror the smartphone's display on that). Heck, I wouldn't even mind if the car has no screen at all - just allow a place to dock your phone and use it's screen instead.