Time to sit down. Dust off and reflect about the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco. This was the Second MeeGo Conference, the first one being held in Dublin (Ireland) back in November . As numbers go the event was a success, with the keynote being full capacity.
There were the almost obligatory Hacker Lounge / WereWolf sessions with a bigger and comfier Hacker Lounge in which there was fun to be had, but this was an excellent meeting point for developers and for the first time “outsiders” found their way into the layer. There were also the almost obligatory games of WereWolf.
Pre Warm Up workshops were held mainly focusing on software development drilling down into Qt, Community OBS,UX, Intro to MeeGo SDK, Linux Developer tools, Qt Development tools.
Angry Birds – What do you get when you combine wood, glue and Angry Birds ??? You get the Angry BIrds contest. Teams battled it out in the Hacker Lounge. Check out this Wicked Video courtesy of NetBook news
During the Intel AppUp sessions ExoPCs were given out to the Developer faithful and they were received with open arms. This is one way to kick start a EcoSystem. We were spoilt with over 80 Sessions which was the meat of the conference with over 80 different sessions that covered. Generaly covering topics for beginners and intermediate developers but the Q&A sessions were a chance to engage with the speakers.
The KeyNote resonated the message of celebration, of the 20th Anniversary of Linux and its achievements such as running the Internet , 75% of stock exchanges world wide and Powering the servers running Amazon, Google, Facebook and Ebay. Linux was here in the shape of MeeGo, WebOS and Android. Linux was in Good shape. Hang on …. wasn’t this a MeeGo Conference ? And this is when confusion sets in …..
We saw a lot and at the same time we didn’t. The much lusted after Nokia N950 didn’t make a guest appearance following on from the rumours from last week. Even though this was not entirely unexpected there was a feeling that it would have been nice for Nokia to have stood up and been counted, actively showing some support for MeeGo. I won’t go into the reasons of the Nokia device being held up, this is not the place for it. So when can we expect “the device”, by all accounts and available information at hand it “should be” a matter of weeks now. Just to reiterate this is DEFINITELY a development device and not for everyone. It is hoped that Developers can use this as a target device to test their applications and processes.
So where were LG? A Non show. Since the presentation leak giving information of what they had planned to talk about including Protos type, Prototypes it has to be said that they have had since last year (LG W990 that I drooled over a year ago). It seems LG just were not ready for the lime light and possibly attention that was thrust upon them. I’m sure they will return to show off what they have but without the burden of great expectations crippling them. It would have also been good to see all the recent vendors that were celebrated recently to be part of the TSG (Technical Steering Group) for China Mobile, Huwaie, Tencent and Panasonic.
Many of us didn’t get the sense of direction that we were hoping for from this conference. It is sad. We wanted be able to plot the direction and progress of MeeGo indicated from this Conference and we just can’t. So, Is MeeGoExperts closing its doors because of all this doom and gloom ? NO ! By all accounts all the “Good Stuff” that we were hoping to be part of the Conference will come in the coming weeks / months. More Hardware Vendors, Nokia WILL release its device and tangible momentum will be OURS ! There are still lots of work going on in the shadows and the fruits of which will be known soon.
There was also news that the original plan of having two conferences per year, every 6 months was being pulled, One conference per year it is now with the reasoning that there was not too much fundamentally changing in the OS or surrounding infrastructure / EcoSystem to warrant two conferences per year. I can see this view but as this means I will ONLY see the community once a year I can only feel sad.
