Is Meltemi the full touch S40 OS from Nokia?

Nokia took their own sweet time in transitioning to the world of touchscreen mobiles. It started off with S60 5th Edition, then moved onto Symbian^3, Anna and now, Belle. They’ve even thrown in a MeeGo OS-based phone, the N9, which should be launching shortly. However, you’ll notice no love was shown for their lower-end handsets, the ones running Symbian Series 40. With the touchscreens clearly being the future of mobile computing and with plenty of Android touchscreen phones launching left right and centre in the sub-10K segment, Nokia’s S40 phones are slowly starting to seem pointless. However, in a recent story carried by the Register, they mentioned Nokia CEO Stephen Elop talking about a project Meltemi, a part of the MeeGo development program.

What’s cooking in Nokia’s labs?

Nothing is certain as of now, but if we have to speculate, this could be a replacement for the S40 OS. So far, we don’t have any news about S40 going the full touch route and WP7 still needs high-end hardware to function, which leaves us with MeeGo. If you look at it more closely, Meltemi is a type of Wind and if you look back at Nokia’s naming convention for their MeeGo/ Maemo devices, it’s been Fremantle, Diablo, etc, which are also types of Winds which would indicate a possible new line of phones and the only ones that really need a jump start are the low-end ones based on S30 and S40. If this does materialize, it could put Nokia back in the running. 

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