This seems to support my hunch that far from planning to bet irrevocably on WinPho, Nokia is actually trying to keep its options open: pick up a sweet deal to be Microsoft's premium partner in smartphones for a couple of years, use that time to shuck off Symbian, keep MeeGo alive as a tablet OS. Then after that couple of years, when the MS smartphone exclusive expires, take a fresh look around and decide whether to go with one or more of WinPho, Android, MeeGo or whatever may be around at that point. Doesn't seem like a self-evidently terrible strategy, though there's an obvious risk that WinPho will continue to founder and that Nokia won't have the time or money or brand loyalty to tough it out through another couple of years of failure in smartphones.
Another risk for Nokia is that this deal doesn't so much change MeeGo's status as keep it the same. I get the impression that MeeGo can remain a "promising", half-finished project indefinitely, for as long as Nokia keeps it in development. The technically accurate name for this state is not 'vaporware' but 'GNOME stew'. :) Perhaps only the raw terror of betting Nokia on MeeGo smartphones could get it to coalesce into a really competitive platform. (Competitive in technical/UI terms, leaving aside other problems like market share.) Or fail to coalesce and be cancelled.
MeeGo's apparently going to see commercial use as a tablet OS, but unless Nokia shakes its apparent attitude that a tablet is a little thing you do with your Linux-based platform when you don't dare to put it on your smartphones then the tablets won't be the crucible that MeeGo apparently needs. (And they aren't likely to do well in the market either.)
