As far as I can see, Nokia's strategy for past decade was to rely more and more on external suppliers, be it hardware or software non-core business. This is classical learning from MBA courses (concentrate on your core competencies) and can be seen same way here. After all, MeeGo developments were also in this style -- make it possible to externally develop whole core OS and only work on the areas where your differentiation is worth from business/strategy points of view. If you have ever looked into Nokia's Maemo Base Port requirements for external vendors, you'd seen that immediately.

http://www.developer.nokia.com/Commu..._Port_v1.1.pdf

Now, all this means that if there is even something coming out of Nokia on "meltemi" wind, it most likely follow similar approach by acquiring base OS or even adaptation parts from those hardware manufacturers who are working with Linux. But as there are very few of those in low price points and most of them seem to be oriented to Android business, it would be interesting to see what Nokia gets. Android base port is sufficiently different from what Maemo base port was, including available APIs (bionic vs eglibc, for example, power management at drivers level, etc). Maintaining real-time code on top of such base port seem to be unlikely and business unviable, at least to me. There are some RT-related patches for Linux kernel, but then, if your HW vendor gives you a kernel that he supports, would you struggle with your own patches on top of it without dedicated kernel team of quality that already left the ship?