The Intel MeeGo device will have an Atom processor, and will require being shutdown (suspend-to-ram or such) to last all day without charging, just like my Fujitsu U820. It will also likely have a much worse screen and no better pocketability, and a moderate performance boost -- and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's no keyboard, since everyone seems to think knocking off the iPad is the way to win. If they really pull it together and making something that unambiguously beats my U820, I have no problem buying it, but at this point it seems far more likely that the GMA500 driver situation gets resolved and I just run MeeGo on the U820.

(The U820 is, in my eyes, very much the same sort of pinnacle in the UMPC/netbook arena that the N800 is in the non-phone tablet arena -- the competition's getting newer and faster, but somehow none of them can quite beat it all 'round. 3-4 years is an eternity, but the N800 is still hanging on, and I bet the U820 will as well.)

Nokia's device, OTOH, may be late and somewhat lacking in performance, but will definitely be pocketable, making it a plausible replacement for my N900. It will probably also not run all day (but it'll be "slim" ), but at least the solution will be use it less (but not shut it down), and I'm betting (from N810 and N900) it will soon have an aftermarket double-capacity battery to fix that. Since (at least once the aftermarket battery comes out) this will be an unambiguous upgrade over the N900, it's reasonably likely I'll buy it at some point, unless someone else turns out a better MeeGo pocketable.

And AFAICT the only way this news affects the MeeGo-Harmattan device is a possible delay due to reorganization -- certainly it would seem odd if someone was going to buy a Nokia device, but a couple month delay would force them to choose a completely different form-factor even though they know the device they would have bought is still coming...

See, just because Nokia and Intel have realized how much common ground there is in the software that runs on phones/PDAs/(little)tablets and on netbooks/umpcs/(big)tablets doesn't mean that Nokia will suddenly become a netbook company (yeah, I know about the Booklet, and it has nothing to do with Nokia's MeeGo team), or Intel will become a phone company -- they've collaborated on the areas that make sense and remain entirely distinctive in the areas where they differ. As it happens, I am a customer in both markets, but not for the same device -- the only sense in which I would buy one device "instead" of the other is if I wanted both, but couldn't afford them.


Ok, that was quite a wall-o-text -- sorry guys....