After last month’s meltdown of webOS, rumour has it Intel is putting its open OS, MeeGo, out to pasture after Nokia effectively sidelined the platform and focused all resources on Windows Phone 7. Add in a less-than-enthusiastic response from mainstream vendors and the outlook isn’t looking good for the OS favoured by tech savvy smartphone consumers.

Despite Nokia rolling out their first (and possibly last) MeeGo smartphone in June with the shapely and colourful N9, it’s all gone quiet on whether consumers can buy the handset anywhere in Europe, with the UK being a definite no-no.

However, it has been reported that the Gorilla Glass-toting, 8 megapixel Carl Zeiss-equipped unibody design has been ostensibly repurposed for the forthcoming Sea Ray Windows Phone 7 device instead.

Taiwanese tech news outlet DigiTimes claims to have heard from multiple anonymous industry sources that rather than disappearing into the shadows to lick its wounds, Intel will now focus on handset platforms to be paired with either Android or Windows Phone in 2012.

However, all may not be lost for the Linux based operating system. While Samsung refuted rumours of taking on webOS in Berlin last week, it could swoop in as a white knight for MeeGo to potentially reduce its dependency on Android, following the acquisition of Motorola by Google and grumbles from the Korean Government.

The move could be a good one for Samsung too as MeeGo was designed for a variety of different screen sizes ranging from smartphones to internet enabled televisions, all of which the Korean conglomerate manufactures. Furthermore its proprietary Bada smartphones use the Linux kernel so future iterations of Bada 3.0 could potentially become MeeGo devices.