Nokia heading to release MeeGo Harmattan 1.2 beta aka PR1.2 for developers

Nokia: Heads up for Harmattan 1.2 beta developer release

Nokia has recently shared a news about MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan 1.2 beta developer update that will be released shortly to the developers with Nokia N950 (Developer’s device.) This early release is supposed to be giving developers some time to test their applications and verify they work flawlessly on the new version of the platform. This shows somewhere to assume that alpha release for Nokia N9 users is also near and coming after wards.

If you have missed then there is some spoons from the PR1.2 running on Nokia N9 which was earlier spotted on the blogosphere. Showing features as already were known to come with PR1.2.

We will be shortly releasing a developer edition of MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan 1.2 beta (feel free to crack a joke v 1.2 here) to developers with Nokia N950 Developer Device. The goal of this early access release is to enable developers to verify that their applications do not exhibit any regressions in the new platform version.

This release will be available as a one-click-flasher for Nokia N950 Developer Device. In other words, in order to participate in this beta you need to already have a Nokia N950 Developer Device.

We have done our best to ensure full binary compatibility from Harmattan 1.0 and 1.1 (and 1.1.1 Arabic) to Harmattan 1.2, but we want to offer developers the opportunity to test and verify their apps on the real thing before actual global roll out of the consumer release. There will be also small changes between beta and final consumer release, mostly focusing on ensuring release robustness and performance.

There is at least one known change in the Harmattan 1.2 (and 1.1.1 Arabic) that is impacting developers: The system font change. See blog posts The default font will change — to bigger and better (18th Dec 2011), Font change part 2: playing with the line height (21st dec 2011) and Font change part 3: Flexible UI layouts (5th Jan 2012) for more details.

More information on the release features and fixes, distribution and Nokia N9 support will be available later. The Nokia N950 Developer Device program was closed in the summer, and thus no new entrants are accepted.

[via Nokia Developer]