In July we reported that a new Finnish company called Jolla had been formed from a team of specialists that had worked on the MeeGo-powered Nokia N9. It planned to release a smartphone with a new user interface based on MeeGo.

A few days ago Jolla Ltd announced a new ecosystem alliance to support a MeeGo-based mobile OS codenamed ‘Sailfish’ and today it’s confirmed a date for the public unveiling of its user interface.

There's plenty of variety in The Fonecast this week. We start the podcast with news of MeeGo's resurrection by Finnish smartphone company Jolla before talking about a mobile network that’s giving away mobile data whenever its customers watch video advertisements.

There's also time to discuss Telefonica's recent deals, the rise of free WiFi availability, tablet-related legal action, malware in the Apple App Store and the truth behind a recent 'exploding mobile phone' story.

Mark Bridge writes:

It was a good week for technology stories hitting the mainstream news, thanks to the apparent appearance of a Higgs boson, Sir Alan Sugar’s YouView online TV service and football goal-line technology.

Mobile-related news hasn’t been quite so big, although plenty of well-known names have turned up in the headlines. What’s also been turning up – rather more than usual – is the presence of WiFi.

Last year’s announcement of the Tizen open source mobile project appeared to suggest an end to the Linux-based MeeGo platform, which was formed in February 2010 with the merger of Maemo and Moblin. However, a new company in Finland is promising to keep the MeeGo OS going.

Jolla Ltd has been formed from the team that built the MeeGo-powered Nokia N9, along with a number of other MeeGo specialists.

It’s reported that Samsung is working on merging its own bada mobile operating system with the Tizen OS.

Samsung announced bada just over two years ago, while Tizen is a newer Linux-based open source project with development led by a technical steering group composed of Intel and Samsung.