Read-only archive of the All About MeeGo website (2009–2012) · About this archive

About This Archive

This is a read-only archive of the All About MeeGo website, which covered the MeeGo mobile platform from 2009 to 2012. The archive contains 373 articles — news, features, reviews, and podcast entries.

The short life of All About MeeGo

All About MeeGo, and its predecessor All About Maemo, were among the shorter-lived sites in the All About family. They never had quite the same resources or attention as All About Symbian or All About Windows Phone, and that reflected the reality of the platforms they covered.

All About Maemo was the more interesting of the two, in some ways. The Nokia N800 internet tablet and then the N900 were genuinely fascinating devices — among the most interesting things Nokia ever produced. The N900 in particular was a real Linux computer in your pocket, with a terminal, apt-get, and a community of developers who treated it more like a portable workstation than a phone. It attracted a passionate, technically sophisticated audience.

When Nokia and Intel merged Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo in 2010, the site transitioned with it. The Nokia N9, which arrived later that year, was an incredibly elegant device — the swipe-based interface was years ahead of its time, and the polycarbonate unibody design influenced everything Nokia made afterwards. But it was barely given a chance on sale — limited to a handful of markets with minimal carrier support. The question of whether Nokia's future would be MeeGo or Microsoft was theoretically in play for longer than many people realise — the public commitment to Windows Phone didn't come until the burning platform memo in February 2011. But it's hard not to see Stephen Elop's arrival as CEO in September 2010 as the defining moment. The internal machinations were well underway, even if the N9 itself showed just how good the alternative path could have been.

I remember having to make a judgement call, based on our industry knowledge and contacts, that MeeGo wasn't going to get the long-term backing it needed. This was apparent even before Stephen Elop's "burning platform" memo in February 2011, which made it brutally explicit. For MeeGo, the end came swiftly — more so than for Symbian, which arguably still had a few years of viable life ahead of it.

But you can't help wondering what might have been. Nokia's Linux-based software platforms were widely seen as the future within the company and across the wider industry. Huge numbers of talented engineers were working on Maemo and MeeGo, and many believed it had real potential to compete. It's absolutely possible to imagine an alternative timeline where Nokia committed to its Linux strategy earlier, never pivoted to Windows Phone, and ended up as a credible third ecosystem alongside iOS and Android. Whether that would have worked is unknowable — but the N9 showed what was possible, and the articles in this archive capture the moment when that future still seemed within reach.

About this archive

The original allaboutmeego.com domain has lapsed and is no longer available. This archive was generated from the original CMS database — the same database that powered All About Symbian and All About Windows Phone — rather than from a copy of the live website.

The focus of this archive is content preservation, not a faithful reproduction of the original site design. The original All About MeeGo used a multi-column layout with sidebars containing search, advertising, forum feeds, polls, and external links — all of which are now defunct. Rather than reproduce a broken layout, this archive presents the articles in a clean, single-column reading format that preserves the original MeeGo branding while prioritising readability.

Some article images may be missing. The original site referenced images hosted across several domains (allaboutmeego.com, allaboutsymbian.com, allaboutmaemo.com), not all of which are still available. Where images are missing, the surrounding text and captions are preserved.

What was MeeGo?

MeeGo was a Linux-based mobile operating system created through the merger of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin platforms in 2010. It powered the Nokia N9 (2011) — widely regarded as one of the best-designed smartphones ever made — and was intended for phones, tablets, netbooks, and in-vehicle systems. Nokia's pivot to Windows Phone in February 2011 effectively ended MeeGo's future as a mainstream mobile platform, though its legacy lives on in Sailfish OS (developed by Jolla, founded by former Nokia MeeGo engineers).

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Archive maintained by Rafe Blandford. Generated from the original CMS database, April 2026.