Dell thinks it can make a buck off
Windows 8 tablets, despite the fact that it
pretty much abandoned its Android tablets last year. Dell's
Chief Commercial Officer Steve Felice told Reuters this week that he thinks disaffection with iPads by corporate IT
departments creates an opportunity to sell mobile devices that run on Windows
-- something they are familiar with. "On the commercial side there are a
lot of concerns about security, interoperability,
systems and device management, and I think Dell is in the best position to meet
those," Felice saiys. In addition to taking a run at Windows 8 Dell may
also fire up its Android tablets again, but that is to be seen. "We have a
roadmap for tablets that we haven't announced yet," he says. "You'll
see some announcements...for the back half of the year. We don't think that
this market is closed off in any way."
Butting Heads with iPads
Two postings by
Microsoft indicate that it's not only inevitable that tablets based on
Windows 8 be compared to iPads,
Microsoft is actually encouraging the comparison.
First, the company supports a Web page that instructs Windows 8 developers how to
reshape their iPad apps into Metro style apps, and points to a site that
details how much they can get paid for those apps. It also touts certain Metro
navigation and control features as being superior to those employed by Apple. The second posting on the Building Windows 8 blog outlines the screen resolutions that Windows 8 tablets can support. It turns out
the maximum screen resolution is higher than that for the new iPad and its
famous Retina display. The post is about how to write Metro apps so they look
good on any screen size with any resolution above minimum Windows 8
requirements, but it's hard to miss that the maximum resolution (291 ppi) is
greater than the new iPad's (265).
PC Market Health Relies
on Windows 8
IDC reports that the
growth of PC sales in 2011 were slow and that it will stay slow through midyear.
It says there is some hope at the end of this year and the beginning of next
for increased growth, but that will depend on Windows 8. "2012 and 2013
will bring significant changes for Microsoft and the PC community," says
IDC analyst Jay Chou. "Windows 8 and Ultra books are a definitive step in
the right direction to recapturing the relevance of the PC, but its promise of
meshing a tablet experience with a PC body will likely entail a period of trial
and error, thus the market will likely see modest growth in the near
term." That's a lot of pressure on Windows 8, which clearly has been tuned
for touchscreen tablets. Microsoft may be trying to help out the PC market by
its persistent use of the term PC for things that are clearly not PCs. For
example, it refers to its Windows on ARM devices - mainly tablets - as WOA PCs.
Windows 8 Due Out in
October
This old general
consensus earned new headlines this week when Bloomberg reported that anonymous
sources confirmed October as the launch month. In addition to pointing up the
hysteria surrounding the pending release, the story also served to put forth
some detail about what Windows 8 devices will be ready to roll on launch day.
The same unnamed sources say three ARM tablets and more than 40
Fixing Windows 8 Still
Broken
The visceral rantings of
a former Microsoft employee struggling to come to grips with Windows 8 were
abruptly ended about a week ago when his fixingwindows8.com site went blank. So
did his Twitter account, according to Network World blogger
Andy Patrizio. He wonders if
Microsoft might have been behind shutting down the site and its mostly negative
posts about the frustrations of learning the new operating system. Microsoft
wouldn't comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment