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Nokia is facing a barrage of advice that it should dump its MeeGo smart phone software in favour of Android or Windows Phone 7. A new prototype handset from Aava Mobile suggests that there’s a third way: combining MeeGo with Android on one device.
Before you get excited, know this: you won’t be able to buy Aava’s smart phone in the shops. Instead, the prototype is a showcase for the company’s Intel Atom Medfield-based chipset, and has been made with a view to getting developers better acquainted with Aava’s innards.
Specs are thin on the ground in SlashGear’s report, other than the fact that the prototype device is just 8.9mm thick, and offers a choice of Android or MeeGo. Aava’s website isn’t much more enlightening, with a mostly-blank specs column for its ‘Second Generation Smartphone Platform’.
The ‘Aava Core’ technology is aimed at companies who want to launch a smart phone or tablet quickly. There’s every chance it could appear in devices over the next year, although probably not from the established handset makers.
There’s a bigger question about why you’d want a dual MeeGo/ Android smart phone. Presumably the appeal for handset makers would be access to more than 100,000 Android apps, while also letting people build whizzier MeeGo apps and games that make the most of the MeeGo hardware. Or maybe it’s just for people with split smartphone personalities — the kind of techies who relish booting Android up on a jailbroken iPhone.
Aava will be showing its new prototype off at Mobile World Congress, anyway, so we should find out more about its capabilities there, not least how it compares to the latest generation of high-end Android smart phones, and possibly a few MeeGo devices too.
