Orange to carry MeeGo devices by end of 2010
Orange intends to bring out smartphones, tablets and netbooks using Intel and Nokia's MeeGo Linux platform by the end of the year, the company has said.
On Wednesday, Orange and Intel announced a strategic agreement to develop Orange multimedia services for the MeeGo platform, which was itself announced in February at Mobile World Congress.
MeeGo, a fusion of Intel's Moblin operating system for mobile internet devices (MIDs) and Nokia's Maemo operating system for MIDs and smartphones, is tailored for use on systems using Intel's low-powered Atom chipset.
"Seventy-five percent of our customer base has yet to embrace the mobile internet," Orange devices chief Yves Maitre said in a statement. "With the increasing number of phones and operating systems for customers to choose from, it is our role to make sure their journey into this richer mobile multimedia environment is simple and easy."
According to the terms of the agreement, Intel and Orange will work together on services such as Orange TV and Orange Maps, making sure they run in the MeeGo environment across different device types and screen sizes.
A spokeswoman for Orange told ZDNet UK that devices resulting from the partnership would be sold "towards the end of the fourth quarter" of this year, but declined to comment on the identity of the devices' manufacturers.