Nokia talking homegrown 'Harmattan' release of MeeGo at May conference, but it's nothing new

Some noise has been made today over the news that Nokia is going to be chatting up its Harmattan platform at May's MeeGo conference in San Francisco, suggesting that Nokia will be releasing Harmattan devices as a precursor to its MeeGo offerings -- some sort of postmortem Maemo 6 sendoff before Espoo starts to take MeeGo seriously. In reality, there's nothing new here: it's been known for the past year that Harmattan was happening -- and it's looking more than ever like it's Nokia's full-on MeeGo play, having pulled the code over from the work it had already done on Maemo 6. The abstract for the Harmattan session at the conference says that Nokia will "clarify" the relationship between the project and MeeGo proper, but at no point has Nokia skirted around the fact that Harmattan was still in the works -- and with the company's commitment to MeeGo beyond its 2011 product line a big question mark right now, we wouldn't be surprised if Harmattan was as far into the MeeGo ecosystem as Nokia ever got.