MWC 2011 Live: MeeGo Tablet & Smartphone Hands-on

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A few weeks before MWC any smartphone enthusiast that’s pretty much updated with what’s going on in the smartphone business would have told you that the Spanish event was likely to bring us the first MeeGo smartphones from Nokia.

Well, you can scratch that off your list and start considering WP7 handsets in case you still want to stick it out with Nokia. As for Intel, well, the company is still interested in MeeGo and will apparently keep working on the mobile platform, at least for a while longer.

There’s even a MeeGo booth at MWC filled with all sorts of MeeGo gadgets (some of them also featured in the images below) but everyone is really interested in something else. In fact the booth itself is covered with a huge image of a happy duo, a smartphone and a tablet, both running MeeGo, and that’s what the crowds want to see. Once you enter the stand you immediately notice there’s absolutely no MeeGo phone and when you start asking around people will tell you that it’s “just a picture on a wall.” True story.

Moving on to that MeeGo tablet, well, I already see it dead-on-arrival, if indeed it will arrive at any point in the future. The device is rather unimpressive, too big and bulky and prone to lagging and other afflictions. I tried to get around it, which should be a simple and intuitive thing to do, just look at iOS, or, more recently, at Honeycomb to see how a user should be able to work with a tablet right from the moment it opens up the box, but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience or the brief demo offered.

The unnamed MeeGo tablet, as I haven’t heard anybody asking me if I want to see the “X”, was waiting for visitors in various sections of the rooms, only visitors were not exactly in a hurry to test it out. So that’s why, although I was one of those people that hoped MeeGo will be a turning point for Nokia, I will admit that, at least right now, MeeGo is a no go and requires further work. Maybe that’s exactly why Nokia left Intel for Microsoft so they can make WP7 babies together.

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