Nokia and Intel have opened up their MeeGo operating system for public development with the pre-alpha release of MeeGo’s baseline source code.

“We believe the trajectory for innovation can be higher for MeeGo than for Android,” said Tom Miller, head of MeeGo ecosystem development at Nokia during a presentation at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference in San Diego yesterday. “Watch this space.”

MeeGo is being designed to work across a variety of device types with wireless connectivity, including tablets, laptops and in-car entertainment systems. The pre-alpha release of MeeGo’s source code includes a dialer, SMS, photo viewer, browser, and personal connection management applications.

Miller said Nokia released the code at an early stage so that every phase of the development of MeeGo would be open to developers. “We’re opening up MeeGo for public development so that people can see what’s being developed in real time,” he said. “We don’t want the road map to be controlled by one market.”

Nokia is currently working to create a certification program for MeeGo developers and plans to release MeeGo 1.1 in October. MeeGo is an open source, Linux project that combines Intel’s Moblin technology with Nokia’s Maemo platform.