One big reason that many of us are not looking at is that so far Nokia has been good selling phones by itself. But it hasnt managened this in NA because here ISP tie-ups count a lot. Face it, in North America, Nokia doesnt have any stores, they closed their only 2 premium show stores ( in NY and Chicago) , they have to tie-ups with ISP to sell discounted phones which is the only way MOST Americans buy their phones. Lacking this distribution channel in NA, they had no way to sell Maemo or Meego phones even if they were ready. Also the ISP's play a big part is accepting or rejecting a phone on tier networks and most NA ISP's are unwilling to test a new unproven OS on their networks. It takes a lot of money and time for the ISP to certify a device and a OS on their networks. Also the mobile market has been moving so fast that for Nokia to catch up, they needed an OS with some ecosystem around it. Android while being the best choice in terms of ecosystem was unsuyitabel for Nokia as they would be commoditized along with mfrs as HTC, Samsung, LG etc. Nobody wants to go there - unless you can make phones on the cheap. And the Android phone market is chock full of cheap phones so competing on that front was a serious risk. They only other viable option was WP7. Being an underdog (MS WP7 is an underdog in the mobile world) Nokia could play a stronger role - and we did see this - Nokia managed to get serious rights to change and customize WP7 in their own way. While it may not be the best of choices, its the only one they had to hit the ground running. Without Meego having anything to show for it, and Symbian seriously showing its age, I think Nokia chose the least bad of the bad options that it had. I think the key was that Meego while being trumped up to be a very good OS, delivered too little too late for Nokia. Look even Palm/HP delievered WebOS in short time and now HP has said that they will make WebOS work on Smartphones, Tablets (already done) and also on PC's very soon. Wasn't that the vision of Meego too ? But lets face it when we all saw Meego 1.1 it was not ready in any shape or form for geeky end users. Meego 1.2 is still months away from fir and finish looks. So how much ever Nokia customised their own UI, the base Meego OS first has to be ready - which it is not.