BARCELONA – The worst product I've seen so far at Mobile World Congress is Intel's MeeGo OS running on a netbook. What's even worse than trying it is knowing that it's going on sale in the US.
Intel was left high and dry by Nokia, its main partner, when Nokia decided to switch its smartphones to Windows Phone 7 last week. But Intel soldiers on, assembling a booth and a tent's worth of MeeGo partners to show that MeeGo is still a going game (and that Intel still has a chance in mobile devices.)
It's telling, though, that you don't see MeeGo in anything handheld in Intel's tent. Intel's relatively power-hungry Atom chips fit into netbooks, set-top boxes and large tablets, but the only phone we've heard of with Atom at this show is the latest generation of the developer unit that Aava Mobile has been showing for quite a while now.
In the Intel tent, I got to play with a Lenovo Ideapad S10-3 that an Intel rep said would be sold in the US with MeeGo within a few months. Because MeeGo is a free OS, it could cost $50 less than the current $370 price with Windows. But I'm telling you, spend the $50.
MeeGo on a netbook is a series of panels with seriously limited functionality: a Firefox Web browser, a media player, email, an IM program, a file browser, and something called MyZone, which is a screen combining social networking updates, calendar items, and tasks. There are very few other, downloadable apps. It really feels like you've just taken your powerful netbook and reduced it to the capabilities of a free-with-contract smartphone. The fonts looked big and oddly low-resolution in the browser, and I really couldn't figure out why anyone would want this when they have a real operating system as an alternative.
I also got some time with the first prototype MeeGo tablet. Never mind about the hardware; Intel said that this was a developer unit, and final tablets wouldn't look like the big, heavy black slab I used. MeeGo on a tablet starts with a series of tall, skinny panels showing apps, social networking updates, music, photos, and favorite Web pages. On its face it isn't awful, for a tablet OS, although many graphics looked a bit unfinished and poorly-measured, with too much white space. Windows Phone 7 pulls off the "panel" style with much more flair.
But once again, I just couldn't figure out how this is in any way preferable to the very finished, polished Honeycomb experience. I couldn't find any games that showed off the power of Intel, and full-screen, high-res video is old hat on Android by now. The app store for MeeGo tablets isn't even ready yet.
MeeGo now appears to be a solution looking for a problem. We've fought the "Windows vs. Linux" battle in laptops before; Windows won, because Windows is familiar to people and has lots of existing, powerful apps. On tablets, meanwhile, MeeGo seems to exist so Intel chips have somewhere to go, but the bare-bones first-generation MeeGo tablet experience doesn't show off the power of the Intel chips in any perceptible way.
If this is MeeGo, then maybe Nokia did, in fact, make the right decision.