What does MeeGo mean for Mobile Linux?

From the "Maemo, to Moblin to LiPS' files:

There have been multiple efforts from multiple vendor groups over the last 5 years to develop a successful mobile Linux operating system.

Now we've got another one with MeeGo that my colleague Andy Patrizio reported on yesterday.

The pairing of Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin was a bit surprising to me initially, but in many ways it does make sense. To be blunt, Nokia's Maemo Linux platform was going nowhere fast.

After years of hearing about it, I'm only aware of one phone the N900 that runs Maemo -and that's from Nokia a company with hundreds of devices and handsets. Moblin on the other hand is the benchmark standard that Linux distros have been aiming for when it comes to netbooks - Intel Atom powered netbooks to be precise.

I see only one reason why Moblin will benefit from Nokia's participation and that's Qt. Nokia own Qt Software (formerly known as Trolltech) and it provides what some developers view as a superior open source toolkit for user interface development.