MeeGo Handset project: day one

Day One of the MeeGo Handset UX is finally upon us, bringing with it the UI and many of the applications that will likely form the basis of Nokia's Harmattan release later this year. Today, the handset baseline source code is available to the development community. This code is being actively developed as MeeGo 1.1, which is scheduled for release in October. The team has been preparing MeeGo Gitorious with all the sources and infrastructure to perform the weekly builds for MeeGo 1.1 development. The MeeGo UI team has also been busy creating the handset reference user experience and preparing theMeeGo UI design principles and interaction guidelines. This milestone marks the completion of the merger of Moblin and Maemo as major architecture decisions and technical selections have been determined. The Handset UX image in its current form requires a large amount of effort to install on the N900 (hopefully this should improve in the near future), and much of the functionality you'd expect from Maemo is currently incomplete or simply not present (cellular, for instance). So this release is really only useful to platform- or very dedicated application-developers, and not useful day-to-day.

Hopes that this "Day One" release would finally bring everything out into the open (as stated by several important project members months prior to the release) and signal an end to the big reveal mentality that has so far been plaguing the MeeGo project seem to not have been fulfilled, as many parts of the Handset UX reference set have been held back until they're "ready". This unfortunately gives weight to the opinion that openness in MeeGo is really less about being Open than being open-when-it-doesn't-interfere-with-marketing-nor-make-things-too-inconvenient-for-management. Given the strong smell of developer preview which accompanies this release, "ready" is a very relative term and holding such projects back should not be necessary.