Intel hands out free MeeGo netbooks

Intel have been exercising their generosity by giving away free MeeGo netbooks; unfortunately the free devices aren’t available to just anyone.

The netbooks were donated to “qualified developers” in the hope that they will go forth and develop lots of nice new apps for the MeeGo OS.

Such giveaways are nothing new; Microsoft distributed 30,000 of their Windows 7  phones free of charge, a figure that was more than doubled by Google when they handed out 65,000 free ChromeOS notebooks to beta test the Chrome operating system.

This Intel initiative is a much more low-key affair, with netbooks going to only 140 selected app developers:

“By the end of the night, developers learned that with MeeGo they can rapidly create a variety of experiences across many computing device types, as well as have an opportunity to make money with their applications,” blogged Intel’s Rhonda Peters after the event.

There are concerns though, that Intel have gone too low-key with this one, and that 140 developers are not going to have made enough impact by time the MeeGo OS rolls out on PC devices in April 2010.

Some have taken the lateness of this MeeGo event as an indication that the launch itself will be put back to June.

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