Analyst: MeeGo is ‘the biggest joke in the tech industry right now’

There’s quite a few of us eagerly awaiting the first Nokia MeeGo device to be officially unveiled (most likely at the upcoming Mobile World Congress), but it’s safe to say that Berenberg Bank analyst Adnaan Ahmad is not one of them.

In an open letter to the Finnish mobile giant, Ahmad urged the company to adopt Windows Phone 7 instead, stating that it would give ‘access to the US market where your share has dived to the low single-digit level’.

It wasn’t just market share that concerned Ahmad, but also Nokia’s spiralling R&D cost - recently pegged at just shy of $4 billion, which the analyst bluntly summed up as ‘bloated’ and reasoned that switching to an existing OS would cut the bill by ‘up to 30 per cent’.

For reference, last year Apple spent just shy of $1 billion, and RIM $1.5 billion for R&D - four times less than Nokia.

The most vitriolic comments were saved for the joint Intel-Nokia mobile OS MeeGo, with Ahmad calling it ‘the biggest joke in the tech industry right now...[it] will put you even further behind Apple and Google’.

We presume Ahmad is talking exclusively of the North American market with that final comment, as Nokia is still the world’s largest producer of smartphones.

However, the company has seen its overall share of the mobile market fall by 4 per cent in the past year, while its nearest competitor Samsung steadily grows thanks to its wide-range of Android handsets.