It’s a mixed feeling. Personally it was (always) fun to meet my former coworkers from Qt, Nokia and other KDE folks and catch up and exchange tech gossips. I am also excited to get to know MeeGo team from Intel side as well. The conference itself is professionally organized. The Hacker Lounge idea is perfect, a basement to hang out 24 hours with free cold drinks, lots of games (from fussball to pingpong), superfast and reliable WiFi, and of course a bunch of comfy couches. Hyatt Regency itself proves to be a really really nice venue from such a developer conference.
The three-day program was packed with tons of sessions, anything from Qt 5, Wayland, Scene Graph, Media and IVI, and various other BoFs. Lots of exciting new technologies coming to the next version of MeeGo! Oh BTW, the releases will be every 6 months, expect MeeGo 1.3 in October 2011, along with its experimental Wayland support.
From the device-give-away perspective, Intel threw a lot of ExoPC tablets (flashed with MeeGo 1.2 preview), as part of its AppUp program. I got one for a while, it’s really easy to port your existing Qt apps using its SDK (but that’s a separate blog post).
But that’s about it. LG was supposed to showcase its MeeGo-based LG GW990 (based on Intel Moorestown). There was even rumor that LG has also a tablet product, instead of only just a smartphone. And of course Nokia has its own N9 phone in the pipeline. None of this happened.
When I remember back at Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam, there was an accelerated momentum just because Nokia gave N900 to everyone. It was a top-of-the-line phone at that time, I still even use it for various demos. Back then I was still with Nokia and after all these years, it’s not funny to see that everyone is still using it. It’s fine and dandy to have millions of cars using MeeGo for its infotainment, smart TVs based on MeeGo, and so on. A refresh in this smartphone party however would have made a much more dramatic impact with respect to the momentum in the development community.
Seems I still need to wait until I can use a MeeGo phone as my primary phone. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with ExoPC tablet to learn various bits of MeeGo. And hopefully nothing would exhaust my patience.