The MeeGo Conference in Dublin has attracted over a thousand attendees from all over the world. The diverse audience includes Linux hackers, engineers from prominent hardware manufacturing companies, mobile technology enthusiasts, third-party application developers, and software consultants. The conference-goers exhibit a powerful sense of optimism about MeeGo--despite the fact that the emerging platform doesn't ship on practically any mainstream devices, yet.

Nokia discussed its product strategy during the opening keynotes, but did not disclose the roadmap. The company initially planned to announce its first MeeGo-based device this year, but has pushed it back to 2011. Its handset lineup is still dominated by the struggling Symbian platform, which lacks a competitive user experience and falls short of key rivals. Nokia has been slow to execute its MeeGo strategy, but has recently started to refocus and pick up the pace. Intel has also been slow to fulfill its mobile ambitions, too. The chipmaker has not yet delivered an Atom processor that is suitable for smartphones, though the tablet-friendly Oak Trail chip is expected to arrive next year. The next MeeGo Conference is scheduled for May, and could possibly bring some of the hoped-for announcements.

After some false starts, the Fermi Quadro 4000 Mac Edition was officially announced today. Since this is a Mac version of a card that was launched at SIGGRAPH 2010, not much about it is secret. The card is almost identical to the PC version: 256 CUDA cores, 256-bit memory interface, 2GB memory and the same suggested retail price of $1,199.

Although the PlayBook is months away from being released, RIM is already touting its superiority to the iPad when it comes to surfing the 'Net. In a video created for BlackBerry's blog, a user shows the PlayBook loading webpages more quickly and running JavaScript and HTML5 more fluidly than Apple's iPad. Oh, there's Flash support too.

In the video, a demonstrator from RIM's Web browser development group shows the comparatively petite PlayBook and the iPad side by side, caches cleared and connected to WiFi. He loads a couple of websites simultaneously on the devices, and the PlayBook completes the load first by a large margin, beating the iPad soundly.

I've been using Windows Phone 7 full-time for about a month now, and I like it a great deal. It's a very livable operating system that's been thoughtfully designed and well put-together. So much so that it's almost a surprise that it came from Microsoft.

But perfect it ain't, and there's a lot Microsoft could do to make using Windows Phone 7 even better.

"Would you like to upgrade your car with a GPS?"

"No thanks, I have my phone."

That was the exchange I had while renting a car recently (right after I declined an upgrade to a Hummer). It made me wonder whether sales of dedicated navigation devices were suffering thanks to smartphones with GPS capabilities. According to a new report from industry research firm Berg Insight, that is exactly what's happening—separate GPS devices may soon become a thing of the past as smartphones and in-dash systems take over.

According to Berg Insight, the penetration of Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) is already quite high in Europe and North America, and sales increases in new areas aren't likely to be enough to offset the future decline in these larger markets. (In fact, Europe is already on the decline, though North America is still growing.) The firm expects global shipments of PNDs to hit 42 million in 2011 and 2012, and then decline to 34 million in 2015.

After being unceremoniously killed off after just a few weeks on the market, Microsoft's ill-fated youth-oriented Kin phones could make a return. A document purporting to be Verizon's device roadmap for the fourth quarter of 2010 has been leaked to PPCGeeks, and while many of the phones listed are no surprise—including the Droid Pro and the Palm Pre 2—the list also includes the two Kin devices (Kin One and Kin Two).

Engadget is claiming to have independent verification of the news, too: the Kin platform will be back.

When Kin was first introduced, Verizon classed the handsets as smartphones and demanded expensive smartphone call and data plans ($60-$70 per month). With the target market being teenagers and young adults, this pricing immediately scuppered any hopes that Microsoft might have had for the platform. That won't be the case if and when the handsets are reintroduced: they're now classed as feature phones, meaning that they no longer need to be paired with expensive data plans.

Of course, a large part of the value of the Kin platform was its use of data—automatic uploads of photos and videos, integration with Facebook, e-mail, and so on. Though Verizon now offers a relatively cheap data plan for feature phones ($15 for 150 MB), this would still leave new buyers with limited ability to use the device in the way it was meant to be used. This won't affect WiFi functionality, though, so Zune music playback, with Zune Pass support, will still be there, and the data features can be used with abandon at home.

The most likely explanation for this is simply that Verizon wants to unload its old Kin inventory, and this kind of a repositioning is probably the best way to do it.

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Linaro, a nonprofit organization that aims to accelerate embedded Linux development for the ARM architecture, has announced its first software release. Version 11.10 of the group's software stack quietly debuted this week. The group appears to be attracting interest and making steady progress.

Founded earlier this year by a coalition of ARM technology vendors, Linaro is not quite like other mobile Linux consortia. Rather than producing its own platform, the group wisely decided to focus on upstream work that will benefit existing mobile middleware projects. LInaro's efforts so far have primarily revolved around hardware enablement in the kernel and improving development tools. The group's work will eventually reduce the time that it takes for companies to bring ARM-powered products to market with Linux.

Boxee announced Thursday that its Boxee Box—a set-top box for streaming video content built in collaboration with D-Link—is on like Donkey Kong now available in 33 countries. While the device is launching with an impressive array of access to online sources and compatibility with numerous codecs, the company also promised that Netflix and Hulu Plus support would be coming in the near future.

The Boxee Box hardware is built on the same Atom-based platform as Google TV, and runs Boxee's eponymous media center software. The device sells for $199, making it more expensive than Apple TV or Roku XD|S but still cheaper than Google TV options from Logitech or Sony.