Apple's iPad was not the first tablet computer as many may think. Tablet's have been around for many years but most of them were only targeted for business use and they were not using tablet oriented OS but Microsoft Windows. What Nokia has done was never aknowledged as it was one of the first manufacturer's to build tablet PC's using an OS specifically for tablets, that was based on Linux. That's how Maemo was born: some Debian Linux, some Series 90 User Interface (Hildon) and Nokia's Internet Tablets were born. But after Nokia's last Maemo device, the N900, which was a hybrid between a tablet and a smartphone and MeeGo becoming the successor of Maemo, we haven't seen any new tablets from Nokia for a long time.
More than a month ago, the MeeGo development team released the MeeGo SDK 1.1 Beta. The first version then was only available for Ubuntu Lucid and Fedora 13 Linux Distributions.Today the Windows port was released.
Russia was the country where the first MeeGo phone was spotted. The hardware seems familiar to that of a N900 with the exception of the CPU which is for the first time an Atom processor. The brand behind the device is Hi/Lo which we never heard. Other than the Atom chip there is also a 5MP camera.
For all the geeks out there following the evolution of the Linux kernel, there is a lot of work coming the last few months with desktop optimisations which really make the Desktop Systems 10-60 times more responsive. More responsive means faster for real time applications.
The source of those speed gains is actually patch than only has 200 lines of code as described by the phoronix article here. The wonders of that patch are not unoticed by the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, which he praised on an e-mail:
For all the newcomers to Symbian and especially owners of Symbian^3 devices there is a great article published over on Mobile R'n'R covering the first 10 essential steps every Symbian owner should take in order to take full advantage of his new device.