Nokia MeeGo tablet outed in leaked image

Bug report reveals company's plans

The rumours of a planned tablet device from Nokia - the spiritual successor to its Internet Tablet devices - appears to be true, with a blurry picture of its planned creation leaking out ahead of the official launch.

Rumours that the Finnish company would be looking towards Google's Android for its first real foray into the tablet market appear to have been nixed by the images - just in case Nokia vice president Anssi Vanjoki describing Android as being like young Finnish boys who 'pee in their pants' during Finland's cold winter months to keep warm wasn't enough of a hint. The snaps show a device of around five to seven inches running MeeGo Linux.

It's an obvious choice for the company to make: there's no denying that the company's flagship mobile operating system, Symbian^3, is ill-suited to a tablet device, and with its previous tablet range having run Maemo Linux, the combined MeeGo project makes sense.

Sadly, the image - which was spotted by members of the Mobile Review forums on a MeeGo bug report site - doesn't reveal much about the device's internals, and with MeeGo running happily on both ARM and x86 architectures it's hard to even guess at the processor that is to be found inside.

While the company has long been an ARM licensee, basing the vast majority of its devices on the company's many low power designs, it's well known that Intel is trying to push its low-power Atom line into the smartphone and tablet markets. With MeeGo being a joint project between Intel and Nokia, could the chip giant be looking to make the Finnish mobile specialist an offer it's unable to refuse?