Probably the biggest problem with Android's fragmentation is that Google is a jack of all trades. Nokia haven't got a search engine and a car that drives itself, Google do. They're like the cuckoos of the technological world - wait for companies to make a profit from something, then try to usurp it. Where is their experience in mobile computing?

nokia, on the other hand, are well versed in it. Symbian wasn't fragmented despite appearing on various manufacturers' devices. Windows isn't fragmented, it has its issues and for sure some of those could be resolved if it made its own hardware, as Mac's demonstrate, but it isn't fragmented. For instance, Windows on a computer with a decent amount of RAM and antivirus should pose no problems ( it doesn't for me anyway).

What i'm getting at is something being available on multiple devices doesn't intrinsically make it fragmented. It will need specific hardware to run at an optimum level for sure, but that's why Nokia are keeping Symbian for its low-mid level phones and MeeGo for the high-end, so we won't have something like the HTC Wildfire running a crippled version of MeeGo. I'm probably in the minority, but while the blogs and anti's of Nokia criticise them for not exclusively having Maemo or MeeGo, I agree with the decision for the above reason - hopefully only the premium devices with the ideal hardware capabilities will run it, while the lower spectrum devices will have the very adaptable Symbian.

So, while mobile phones is Nokia's business and they've been top of the tree for a long, long time and they know what they're doing generally, Google are new to the game and learning on their feet. HTC churn out a new device each week it seems and there are variances in hardware specs (X10 mini, Wildfire etc). Add to that the issues in not rolling out universal updates even on brand new handsets, that's where Android has its problems.

Then again, has there been mention that other manufacturers will have MeeGo? I know it's been said it'll be a cross platform OS and BMW, Asus etc will have it in their in-car entertainment, but i haven't seen anything that, say, Motorola can release a MeeGo phone. I hope not personally.