MeeGo returns next month as Sailfish to fight Android

Doomed operating system MeeGo is lurching back to life, following an unholy resurrection ritual conducted by Finnish startup company Jolla.

The shuffling software abomination -- ditched, in life, by Nokia -- is now code named SailFish OS, its crazed creators say. Excitingly, it looks like we'll see the risen-again platform making its grand debut as soon as next month.

MeeGo briefly looked as it would do battle with Android and Apple's iOS, and impressed us when we saw it running on last year's Nokia N9. Nokia scrapped MeeGo before the N9 was even released however, in favour of Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.

We heard about Jolla, a company made up of ex-Nokia staff, earlier in the summer. Now TechCrunch reports that the fledgling firm is ready to show its creation to the world.

Sailfish OS will be shown off towards the end of November, at a conference in Helsinki, Sweden Finland. The platform's creator said they were "thrilled to finally be able to show the user interface we have been working on". Availability of the software will be revealed before Christmas.

Sailfish is unlikely to make Apple or Google break a sweat, but perhaps the big dogs of the software world should take note of scrappy upstarts such as Jolla. Mozilla is another unlikely contender to the smart phone crown, but its nascent Firefox OS is already confirmed to be appearing on ZTE and Alcatel phones in 2013.

Ultra-cheap phones will be a likely vehicle for operating systems like Sailfish and Firefox OS. If they take off in countries where smart phones are yet to become popular, that could quickly give these smaller organisations power in the mobile market.

I'll be keeping a close eye on what Jolla unveils next month. In the meantime tell me what you think would be needed to take down Android or iOS in the comments, or on our Facebook wall.