While Honeycomb and the iPad 2 duke it out over who will win the summer of tablets, there is another competitor, even further back in the race than RIM. It's the Meego platform, which was formerly the province of Nokia and Intel. Unfortunately, Nokia has already pulled out, and Intel seems to have committed itself to a year-long effort to push the platform, despite the fairly obvious signs that Meego has already lost.

For example, in an effort to get game developers on board with the platform, Intel hosted two sessions at Game Developers Conference in which attendees sat through a rather dull talk, and then were given free $700 Meego tablets. The event was not well publicized, but word on the show floor and street pushed folks to register via their phones, 10 minutes before the event began. Afterwards, the show floor was filled with geeks trying out their brand new dual-core tablets.

Until they all had spent a few minutes with the interface. The tablets all came with Windows 7 licenses, though Windows was not actually installed on them. By the next day, everyone I knew, save one person, had replaced Meego. The interface placed on these devices by Intel, they said, was unusable. One fellow did keep Meego, but he is a Meego/Maemo developer, and installed a ton of custom software and interface layers to make his work properly.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and Windows 7 still has issues with un-dimming the tablet screens when waking the device. Still, it's an expensive boondoggle for Intel, and one that, no matter what they do, won't have the slightest effect on the tablet market. Meego is still destined to be an also-ran, and when you're jostling with RIM for third place in a market that doesn't even really exist yet, I'd say you've got some serious issues.