The roads I take...

If you're a mobile device (say, smartphone or tablet) creator (manufacturer, vendor), now is the best time for you to start making MeeGo your prime strategy!

Here's why:

• The project is very much alive, and has support from at least Intel and AMD, and a few others, including still Nokia.
• The MeeGo system is ready in its bases, with the world-class Linux base giving it all stability and security you need. The applications need some polish and getting them to fully work, but most of the bits and pieces are there, and you'd need to do the finishing touch and polish on any other system as well. And with Firefox 4 Mobile, you get the most fully featured mobile web browser available on the market - and it's already there!
• With MeeGo, you're not bound to any specific vendor as data store or a single, specific application market - community repositories for applications are available for anyone to use, but you can easily put your own services into what you deliver by default if you like.
• But now, after the Nokia+Microsoft announcement, as a device manufacturer, you don't have to fear to have massive competition from Nokia on your hands soon within the still small MeeGo ecosystem - which is good as you can easily get even #1 on this emerging market.
• You have a great community of Maemo and MeeGo enthusiasts that already now await any device that runs that system - without you even building up any market. Nokia has already done that for you as well as made most of the system available, they just didn't make use of what they created. You can.
• And if you dare to play the openness card and mean it, you have not just enthusiasts there, you have an army of beta testers and developers for your devices and software who are more than willing to work with you (without any payment - though they'd love device donations to help testing) to make the devices and software better. And they'll do a lot of spreading the word, helping your marketing, also basically for free! (Well, all they take for it is the rights to their own freedom.)

About the only thing you need to give up is the "boom" effect of presenting the new device, as the community will know about it during development. But then, this even works well for a lot of software projects.

You instantly gain a fellowship of your products even when they're not out in the open yet, and people who are willing to help you to make the product a success. Which device manufacturer can say that?

I go, we go, you go MeeGo. Now.