Despite Nokia's insistence that it is still very much behind MeeGo, Intel is going to the mobile platform dance stag. It would be easy to feel sorry for them if it hadn't felt like a mistake from the beginning. "Disappointed" is how one Intel MeeGo product manager expressed the company's view on Nokia's fickleness. Still, the company presses on, announcing and demonstrating a tablet reference platform, among other advancements, at Mobile World Congress. Intel also showcased MeeGo running a variety of applications.
The MeeGo tablet user experience will run on two standard hardware devices -- the Exo PC (a Windows slate that MeeGo will run on top of) and Wetab (from 4iitoo in Germany). This is a reference platform, where developers can experiment with MeeGo applications. The user interface is primarily an unlimited scrolling experience, with content represented in panes, infinitely displayed as you scroll either vertically or horizontally. In other words, instead of building a hierarchy of content that you drill down into, everything is spread out. It seems different, but not noticeably better or worse than anything else.
Intel said that user interface elements can be written primarily in Javascript and QML (part of the QT family of MeeGo development tools); underlying application code is written in C++. All of the developer support and SDK's are availabe as part of Intel's AppUp developer program. There will also be an open submission process for tablet applications.
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