A collective of ex-Nokia employees and MeeGo affacionados form Jolla-- a Finand-based mobile company aiming to continue what Nokia started with the MeeGo smartphone OS.
COO Marc Dillon leads the company, who has an 11-year history with Nokia including a stint as principal MeeGo engineer. A number of Jolla members are "directors and core professionals" from the Nokia MeeGo N9 division who left the company earlier this month.
"Nokia created something wonderful - the world's best smartphone product," CEO Jussi Hurmola says. "It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story."
Named after a kind of sail boat, Jolla says work on "a new smartphone product and [MeeGo] OS" has been going on since the end of 2011 and it will reveal a MeeGo-powered product "later this year."
MeeGo is an open source Linux-based mobile device OS merging Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo projects. It was cancelled in September 2011 in favour of Intel-Samsung co-development Tizen.
By that time Nokia managed to make 2 devices carrying the OS-- the interesting N9 smartphone (the only consumer MeeGo device to date) and the beta-only N950 developer handset.