According to a Digitimes Senior Research Analyst Nokia may be at the last stage of their push to release a Tablet PC by the end of the year.
They got the low down that an order that 100 engineering samples of the Nokia Tablet PC were ordered from Foxconn Electronics. The Tablet should be around 7 to 9 inches and will feature the MeeGo Operating System. It will also run the ARM processor, no word on what version they are running.
MeeGo is an open source, Linux project run in conjunction with Intel, and Maemo, and Nokia. MeeGo integrates the experience and skills of two significant development ecosystems, versed in communications and computing technologies. The MeeGo project believes these two pillars form the technical foundations for next generation platforms and usages in the mobile and device platforms space.
MeeGo features a three column based type system that remembers the videos and recommends others you might have not seen. For example there is a great looking task manager which blends both the icon-grid view of Android with moveable thumbnails like on WebOS, switched between by using a pinch-zoom gesture.
The default view of the switcher presents the latest accessed task in focus, with the other, different tasks running to the right. Thumbnails are presented in chronological order, as they are opened. It is possible to browse through the thumbnails, one by one, by slowly dragging them, or to use a quick swipe to rapidly pan from one side of the list to the other. Users can use a pinch multi-touch motion to change the switcher into an overview mode. By pinching in, thumbnails move into a grid display.
There is also an Android-style notification bar at the top, which can be dragged down to display recent updates, events and similar information.
Although there is large industry speculation that the Nokia tablet will be on the market by the end of the year, in time for the Christmas season.
There are also rumours that Nokia will offer a SIM card that will allow telecommunication networks to subsidize the cost of the tablet.
Check out the video which walks you through the MeeGo Operating System.
Sources: Slashgear, Digitimes, MeeGo.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
