Meego is still going. Despite the departure of Nokia from the Meego camp, the Meego Developers Conference USA still took place earlier this week. It was right in the heart of San Francisco, in the Hyatt Regency that played host to Mel Brooks' High Anxiety, and Hunter Thompson's famous drunken Super Bowl rant from the balcony.
And it was the site where the Meego faithful struggled to prove their OS of choice was still alive. As a conference, it was packed with talks, and almost devoid of exhibitors. Attendance was free, ensuring a healthy mix of real developers and retired tourists with no idea what Meego was. Free lunch is a powerful enticement.
At the end of the day, this event was basically all about Intel. With Nokia now huddling together with Microsoft, Intel is really the last major vendor standing behind Meego. As Peter Winston, president of Integrated Computer Solutions Incorporated, put it: Intel wants to sell chips, Nokia needed a blockbuster.
Nokia was falling behind the iPhone/Android crowd, and instead of waiting for Meego to mature, it decided to jump onto Microsoft's chariot in the smart phone race. Intel was clearly not happy with this decision, and at the conference, all references to Nokia sleak new Meego-based phone were expunged. One anonymous attendee close to the Meego community said that he expected free Nokia phones for all attendees until Nokia walked away from Meego in February.
On the other hand, there was still free hardware at the event. San Francisco geeks have known since March that Intel is holding AppUpp Labs; time-share-like two-hour talks where attendees get free Exo PC tablets at the end. Said geeks have been passing the word of mouth on these events, and they've packed every recent instance of the talks with developers, non-developers, and even some homeless people. All received their tablets at the end.
Of course, those tablets are qualified as loaners, and while they come with Meego installed, most everyone we've spoken to has used the included Windows 7 license to install a better OS on the device.
It's a wildly different tactic than Google has taken. Free tablets were given to Google I/O attendees, most of whom paid for the privileged of being there. Additionally, Google's Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) has been a hot item in the hacker community, but remained unavailable to the general public. Instead of opening a cattle call to all comers, Google attended the recent hacker-friendly Maker Faire, and handed out ADKs to developers showing off cool projects, and to the room full of hacker spaces at the event.
Intel's hardware handouts are a bit like pulling up to a popular curb and handing out energy drinks, whereas Google's tactic is more like finding a target and strategically mailing it the product. I'd wager Google will see more return on its dime, especially after having attended an Intel tablet session and seeing the level of discourse at these open events.
That “tablet session” at the Meego conference turned out not to yield a tablet: Intel ran out on the first day of the show. That didn't stop one fellow from attempting to get a second one by attending this event. Dubbed “PNG-guy,” by the rest of the Meego conference attendees, this fellow asked the same questions in every Intel session. Questions like “What do you mean by compliance?” “What's GCC?” and the ever popular “What's a PNG?”
At one point, when PNG-guy asked why he needed to include an index.html file in his Web directory, the Intel representative, fed up with the constant stream of stupid questions, just answered “Because I said so.”
Contrast that with the deeply Arduino-focused technical questions we overheard at Google's booth at Maker Faire: developers there were asking about methods for managing signal strength from one device to another before hooking them into an Android device.