Nokia Offers its MeeGo Patents to Jolla, Supports Their Initiative

For Nokia, MeeGo is dead. The company is shifting its entire focus on the development of Windows Phone devices, thus leaving aside all other smartphone platforms it has been working on. 

For enthusiasts, however, the platform is alive and kicking, and promises a great future. We’re referring here to the Jolla startup, which announced a few days ago that it would continue the development on this platform.  

With devices expected to arrive on shelves later this year running under the MeeGo platform, the startup needs all the support it can get. Apparently, Nokia itself is one of the companies that landed a helping hand, by gifting the patents it held on MeeGo to the new company. Apparently, Jolla is one of the companies that was created as part of Nokia’s Bridge project, which was launched to help its employees pursue other purposes in life after leaving their current positions. Since Nokia has operated a lot of job cuts, such a program was needed, and it seems that people from handset vendor’s MeeGo team took advantage of it to come up with this startup.

“Nokia will offer training, funding, and help identify business opportunities and partnerships for those interested in starting a new business or a company on their own, which can fuel new growth for impacted communities,” Nokia notes on the project’s website. Thus, the Finnish giant reportedly decided to offer said patents to Jolla, so as to help its former employees launch new devices as fast as possible, and without having to pay royalties for some of the technologies used inside the OS. Jolla founder Jussi Hurmola told ItViikko of this move coming from Nokia, and also confirmed that new MeeGo handsets might land on shelves before the end of this year. However, no official release timeframe was provided, and we might very well see these phones pushed to 2013.

Apparently, other people in the mobile industry also consider MeeGo as being a potentially successful smartphone operating system, even if Nokia decided to scrap future plans on it.

Nokia N9
Image credits to Nokia

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