Nokia and Intel have been getting friendly for some time and now the two companies are taking their relationship to the next level with the opening of a jointly owned and run laboratory in Finland.

The Intel and Nokia Joint Research Center will be a collaboratively owned and run laboratory at the Centre for Internet Excellence at the University of Oulu. The initial focus will be graphics for mobile devices based on the Nokia-Intel founded Linux initiative MeeGo.

MeeGo was unveiled at Barcelona in February as a merger of Intel and Nokia’s respective Linux initiatives, to create a software platform spanning a range of consumer electronics from mobile phones to netbooks. Intel contributed its Moblin platform and merged it with Nokia’s Maemo platform and the Nokia-owned cross platform application environment, Qt.

The lab’s first projects involve creating new user interfaces for MeeGo and potentially other platforms that use 3D graphics. According to the companies, there’s already a strong 3D internet research community established in Oulu, which the partners hope to tap into.