According to many news tickers, Slashdot amongst them:

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/01/05/2325227/microsoft-in-talks-to-buy-nokias-smartphone-division

rumors spread that Microsoft is about to take over the whole smartphone business from Nokia and as nice cream tip, Elop might change back to Microsoft and lead that pack.

If I would be a Nokia share holder I would sue Elop personally for intentionally destroying Nokia's smartphone business in order to have it later on being taken over by Microsoft entirely.
Doesn't that seem like a good 'evil' plan by Microsoft?

According to HP and their own developer blog, WebOS indeed becomes open source!

http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/12/open-source/

This is excellent and great news. I am looking forward to seeing the actual code and project. I sincerely hope that this will not just become a code-dump onto the community.

I am very excited - let's hope for the best!

Cheers
nils

Maemo5 is effectively not for the future - I love, don't get me wrong! And I will take a lot of care about my N900 because I still think that it is the best Linux-like mobile phone on the market yet. But Maemo as a smartphone platform has reached its end of life. There will not be any new devices and the platform will not evolve anymore.

MeeGo is, despite the never tiring excuses of Intel, effectively almost dead too. I am pretty sure that we will not see any further new MeeGo phones except for the Nokia N9.

And today rumors spread that Samsung is about to open source Bada, their up to now proprietory smartphone system.

According to an interview given by Leo Apotheker, CEO of HP, WebOS might be licensed to other phone makers:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-29/hewlett-packard-is-in-talks-to-license-webos-software-ceo-apotheker-says.html

This could (hopefully) bring some (new) life to WebOS...

For quite some time I was sort of dreaming about an open source navigation solution. The first problem one encounters is that there is no open map data available. Only some very basic stuff, at that time, was available, like coast lines, the Tiger data for the USA and that was about it.

Today's news: Nokia will partner up with Microsoft and their Windows Phone 7 as their new strategic platform for new smartphones.

Pity. That's it for me with Nokia smartphones. I will not buy one anymore and most likely not even a MeeGo based one if this will ever be released.
Why?

According to latest rumors the next Linux based smartphone by Nokia, which is rumored to be named N9, coul be based on an Intel's x86 low-power CPU, presumably Moorestown.

This is quite a pity I think.

First of all the first Moorestown device, IIRC by LG, was an enormous flop. It got hot during runtime and I do not know if it ever actually came into the stores it was only shown off at CES last year.

Hey, cool, the new Maemo5 PR1.3 for N900 is released! The most noticable enhancement is the dual-boot mechanism. With this it will be possible to more easily test-drive other OSes like MeeGo (or FSO, Android?, etc...). I am just now in th eprocess of upgrading - stay tuned!

Quite amazing - during the past two months the "old" OpenMoko Freerunner project gets alive again.
After a long pause some people are working on cleaning up the Freerunner kernel sources again and try to push the patches upstream.
Excellent!
This also seems to clean up some bugs as well.

Wow, this will shake the industry: http://www.meego.com

Nokia and Intel joined forces to create a versatile mobile Linux platform. This is pretty good news since Intel and Nokia are both pretty strong open source supporters. The other good facet of it could be that finally Nokia & Intel together will manage to create a system that will be portable and as versatile and complete as Android.