The project that never officially existed: Meltemi

A top secret operating system was being developed at Nokia side by side with MeeGo in 2010-2012, code named Meltemi. Nokia never officially told about the project. It was an operating system targeted for more affordable smart phones and was never given a final name, but MeeGo Lite was a strong candidate.

Meltemi was meant to be 100% compatible with MeeGo and it would’ve ridden on MeeGo’s developer ecosystem and apps. The objective was to get the operating system to run at a constant 60 FPS and to get apps to launch in one second. One of Meltemi’s main features was data control in a database, which would enable a single call to the database to fetch a lot of information. There were massive difficulties with the development of Meltemi, such as tight schedules, firmware versions, the database and functionality of its features, new SoC and so on.

The project was finally scrapped on June 14th 2012, and Mary McDowell, the person responsible for the project, had to resign. There’ve been a lot of rumors on the Internet about Meltemi being almost finished. According to what we’ve gathered, Meltemi was far from being finished but we’ll have more on that in our next article, “Nokia Meltemi’s story” later in 2013.