‘The year’s most significant collaboration’ was announced, according to Intel who have now decided to make a joint research lab, with new partners Nokia, in the Finnish University of Oulu.

The University that has specialised in 3D interfaces will be the home of the partnership announced last June. Although the partnership has been around since mid last year there has been no evidence of any revolutionary hardware. Despite Nokia proclaiming that it would ‘explore new ideas’ that would ‘go far beyond devices and services on the market today’.

All this and both companies are struggling to keep up in the Smartphone league, with Intel trying to break in and Nokia trying to keep up, time is not on either companies’ side.

They decided to create an open source platform called MeeGo - a combination of their Linux work - Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. This is supposed to be under development as we speak and the first conference is due to take place in October in Dublin.

3D mobile interfaces and virtual worlds from mobile environments  will be the focus for Intel but they warned that this is a long-term project and integration of this into modern handsets was unlikely.