I think that particular video of the tablet is actually very nice. Since they're showing the video already, the "alpha" part pretty much probably means that the UI is ready, so I don't expect it to change much from that.

So yeah, if the marketting is done right (which, in reality, will decide the fate of these devices, not Qt or any other acronym), I don't see why people wouldn't want devices like that. I certainly think it looks pretty cool, even compared to any other OS I can think of. It really isn't "spectacular" in any way, but it doesn't fail in any way either. It doesn't appear to have the Symbian ugliness or the Maemo inconsistent clunkiness to it, so yeah, I think it might work on a tablet for the mass market too IF it came with the same sort of services you can get for the Ipad and the armada of Android tablets soon coming, meaning magazine subscriptions, ebooks, video services, etc, whatever people will want. Of course, I'm also supposing that the Meego devices will be clearly cheaper than the Ipads and that there's a lot of choices between them, not just one or two Nokia tablets available, vs. Apples one device (works for them) and Android's 40.

I think the main point for why it just might succeed on tablets is that it's not yet late to the game, really: the Ipad is here, but the competition (Android tablets) is not. The whole "what are these types of computers used for" idea is still in the process of forming, it's not very established yet. So if the Androids don't come out (too much) before the Meego tablets/pads/whatever, and they seem to match up pretty evenly in terms of "what you can do with it" (forget 10% speed differences or Qt, tools don't matter, success does), I don't see why these Meegos couldn't, if properly marketted, compete.

For phones, I frankly don't believe in Meego one bit. When you strip that video there into "how it must look on a phone", it'll be pretty much Android minus the 100,000 apps, Google-hookup and marketting. If we think about what Nokia does with phones, there's going to be some god-awful Nokia email program, calendar that supports nothing, and horrible Ovi services slapped to that, so yeah, fail.

My guess: a minor phone OS but one of the major tablet OS's.

Somebody should bookmark this thread and check in two years time who was right

I'm confident meego is going to be a huge hit. the preview we've had so far is very positive stuff. Don't knock this os till it's had its day

I think part of the reason webOS has had a hard time is largely due to hardware

I agree but the mobile version looks like its from 2006 and not so much better ui than maemo 5

Well intel is dominant in processor manufacturing, at least not in mobile devices.Unless nokia does something revulutionary in hardware specs they will never return to how they were and stay in the n97 era

Is there some new pics or reviews etc. about the mobile UI? I seem to remember that something was supposed to be released in June, is there an actual video of a "Meego phone" somewhere?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW5wpg5epMs

Pre-alpa...

Thanks for the link. And, hmm, yeah...even if I ignore the lag (the alpha part is very visible there), that really doesn't show anything at all impressive. It's like Android 1.5 with uglier icons. It's of course missing all widgets etc. but wow, I'm really trying here and cannot think of anything impressive about that video.

The best I can say is that when finished, it might look close enough to Android/Iphone to keep the Symbian users from moving to those systems from Nokia when they upgrade their old Symbian phones next year. That's probably the whole point of Meego on the phones, anyway. They better get that out way before Android 3 makes it look even more out of date.

Not impressed at all, totally just strengthens my feelings about what I wrote before.

Sigh... Must be alone.

I don't like the MeeGo UI with the scrolls over there. Who thought it would be a good idea to put all my pictures and videos on the base screen? And web pages. And recents. This is the kind of thing that only looks cool in a demo. WTH.

I don't Twit, nor do I have nor want Facebook, because I have no desire to plaster my face all over the net. A whole band to social networking? Where every twit's tweet is displayed? How long until you finally match a bad photo with a bad moment?

I hope it has something better to show for itself. That UI has nothing new other that the silly idea we want everything we have on the phone largely and prominently displayed. Other than that, it's a bunch of headers consisting of JPG or a PNG or whatnot. The rest of the colors look nice because all that dude has are demo pictures.

Replace the shiny color splashes with your dull camera-shot images and screenshots, the models with actual people, and it starts to seem like less of a good idea.

Also, is it me or are some things insanely fast? Either Maemo 5 is wet toilet paper, or they use a better CPU than the 600 we run. OTOH, N900 is dull as a watermelon on stock speed. I don't think I ever saw a non-amateur demo of N900 at stock.

Oh well. We'll see.

ETA:
It will never look like IPhone because it will never have the polished UI look. We all thought N900 will look polished once the ball gets rolling.

Even with more than I expected from the community, you simply can't match the design dept of a massive corp with a community effort.

I expect, as with M5, for the default themes to remain the the top 5. Meaning, it will look pretty much how it ships.

I hope I'm wrong.

Palm Pre Plus specs:

500 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 (ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX)
512mb RAM
16gb internal storage

Only the screen and CPU clockspeed is really lesser than the stock N900.

I'm sure there are other differences, but the hardware between the N900 and Palm Pre Plus is rather similar. There's been a few other folks around here that's stated the same.

The move of their SDK to HTML/CSS/JavaScript means that a lot of webdevs could have picked it up. It's the lowest common denominator in terms of development.

Palm had a lot of gaffes though, lack of software from the start, lack of games, and some other things. But the point is though that they had the marketing - weird marketing in the US, but they were marketed.

Nokia and marketing do not belong in the same sentence in North America and Japan. To see them pull just that part off (marketing), I'll be surprised.