Intel has announced that it will cooperate with the Chinese Internet company Tencent to jointly develop the next-generation mobile Internet platform, MeeGo.

The cooperation is expected to bring a series of Tencent's featured applications to MeeGo. At the same time, the Chinese instant messaging and Internet value-added services provider will be able to expand its products and services to new devices based on the MeeGo platform.

Under the agreement reached by the two parties, Intel and Tencent will jointly set up an innovation center for the development of MeeGo. In addition, Intel will continue to promote its Atom processor on netbooks and palm computers. Neither side has publicly stated the monetary value of this deal.

MeeGo is an open source Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity. It mainly targets mobile devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, and netbooks. Its first edition will be launched in May 2010 and devices based on MeeGo will be put into the market in the second half of this year. MeeGo is designed for devices using Intel's Atom processor and various MeeGo applications can be downloaded from Intel's AppUp store.