In the world of OSes for mobile phones, there have been a lot of changes lately, with some going away and others joining the race. A while back, Intel announced that they would drop MeeGo, which means that it is dead since there is nobody else to support it if the community can't keep it going. But at the same time, they said the code would be merged with another mobile OS. Intel and the Linux Foundation will be steering the OS with the very unfortunate name Tizen (it can easily be mistaken for meaning penis in some of the Scandinavian languages).

Meanwhile, over at Nokia they are betting on Windows Mobile (and making many of their employees disgruntled), while at the same time releasing the already defunct MeeGo OS in their N9 phone. However, since these are all OSes for high end smart phones, they also need something for their so called "feature phones" which are not power full enough (or have different user groups) to drive all the complex functionality. Enter Meltemi, ironically enough a Linux based OS to replace Symbian S40 series.

The story does not end there, though. Amongst the free mobile OSes, KDE is entering the race. Not with a complete separate OS, but rather a UX platform, Plasma Active, with an API for phones, tables, set-top boxes, home automation, and so on. Plasma Active has to run on top of some OS, and currently they are using MeeGo and openSUSE based Balsam Professional.

It is refreshing to see a lot of movement in this area, and hopefully it will lead to a free alternative. However, the at moment it is still looking somewhat bleak for truly free mobile phone OSes. The firmware and driver issue seems to be never ending, and not even the OpenMoko can escape it.