The first Medfield phone made it to the market (in India). Check this out: it's called Lava Xolo X900 sporting an Atom at 1.6 GHz and running Android it's on par with the *current* competition in terms of performance as well as battery life.

The kicker for me though is its ability to run x86 binaries which would allow for the possibility of running a chrooted x86 Linux distro on the side and even the ability the run Windows apps (via Virtualbox or Wine) at adequate speed.

Obviously, running Meego (the non-Aegis version) would be the far more elegant solution, as one wouldn't need to take the long route via localhost VNC as you would with Android, opening up the possibility of full hardware 3D acceleration as well! Anyone know about the status of Medfield drivers for Meego and if it's at all possible to get it on the Xolo?

I hope the phone gets available in more markets so more tinkerers can get their hands on it.

AFAIK the intel chip performs badly in graphics as its GPU is quite weak. hence, no matter what the CPU, you're still going to get a sub-par chip.

if it was that excellent all Android OEMs would be releasing models with it left, right and centre. Let alone Exonsys chips even Nvidia Tegra outperforms the Atom.

the sgx 540 in that phone is about twice as fast as the 530 in our phone which is FINE

stop dreaming dude. its never going to happen. Now there will be only Tizen for Intel. If Nokia didn't betrayed Intel then sure in that phone it was MeeGo instead of Android.

Funnily enough MeeGo was still mentioned in some of the slides. Probably an oversight though.

Yea, I'm kind of hoping there might still be some Intel or (former) Nokia employee with some willingness to see Meego (after all the effort they put into Meego/Moblin) run on an Intel based mobile with a fast, current CPU to do it justice. That would be an awesome device. Imagine using exactly the same software (binaries) on your mobile as you do on your PC workstation.

Btw, there is also the Lenovo K800 to look forward to, which will has an even sweeter 1280x720 display, and seeing the Xolo review puts it back on my "non-vaporware radar" .

Looking at this slide it seems as even the VM runs on top of this "translator" thing. Even so, it often ranks in the top on performance. Image what it would do with native x86 compiled MeeGo software...

But sooner or later that DalvikVM will compile to x86 as well, at which point it will probably smoke the ARMs for fun times. Still, if Goo "not invented here" gle simply used OpenJDK with its JIT-compiler they'd already have that.

[edit] I'm actually mystified why google went for their proprietary java-abomination... Many ARMs have Jazelle, a CPU mode which runs a great part of the standard Java bytecode as be it native code. No JIT compiler needed. Granted, I have no clue on the actual performance of that construction, and sure enough Jazelle would cost a dear sum of €€€ in licenses. But that's the problem with google anyway, they are so loaded that they can actually can pay for their "not invented here"-way of live

AIUI they would use static translation in the cloud during package upload, not during runtime / on-device:

"ARM native NDK apps on the other hand are translated by Intel in the cloud, validated against Intel's Android x86 emulator and pushed to the Play Store. The point is the bulk of binary translation happens away the device itself and running on much faster Xeons in the cloud. As binary translation requires more cycles than natively running the code, which in turn consumes additional power, this was the only route for Intel to ensure that Atom would remain power efficient (and high performance) even on non-native NDK apps."

No one's actually answered the original question yet. Does the x86 port of MeeGo have the necessary drivers to run on this Medfield device? Has anyone considered buying this phone and attempting to install MeeGo on it?

No, because this Intel chip still use a PowerVR graphic chip, with (as far as I know) no driver availlable for Linux.

Nonetheless, it seems that Intel intends to use atom CPU integrated with their in-house HD graphic GPU (the ones in sandy bridge/ivy bridge processors). These are due for late 2012 or 2013 (codenamed "Valley view" and/or "Balboa Pier").
The HD graphic chips are well documented and have fully open source drivers (and you can allready see valley view specific code in their drivers).

I don't know if these chips will be limited to netbooks/tablets, or if we will see a phone with them, but if it happen it will be much easier to port Mer to it.

I don't know the status of the wireless drivers though, but it would also be intel parts (open too?).