Lenovo Halts Sales of Small-Screen Windows 8.1 Tablets Due To "Lack of Interest" 125
DroidJason1 writes Microsoft has attempted to compete in the small-screen tablet market with Windows 8.1 and Windows RT, but it looks like the growing adoption of small-screen Android tablets are just too much for Lenovo to handle. Lenovo has slammed the brakes on sales of small screen Windows tablets in the United States, citing a lack of interest from consumers. In fact, Lenovo has stopped selling the 8-inch ThinkPad 8 and the 8-inch Miix 2. Fortunately, these small-screen Windows tablets have seen some success in Brazil, China, and Japan, so Lenovo will focus on efforts there. Microsoft also recently scrapped plans for the rumored Surface Mini.
Atom = worthless (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason why I don't have one is because of the processor. I'm still clinging to my 5 year old x200T despite the fact that it runs hot, is heavy, and has a 35w TDP processor (more than modern mobile GPU/CPU/APUs use combined) because when push comes to shove, content creation on an atom processor is a joke.
They could have been the cheap alternative to a cintaq, or the road-warrior-note-taker's dream, but I wouldn't try to run any scripts or plugins. I wonder if it'll even run the latest version of onenote smoothly. (not that you would want to use the current version's tragedy of an interface)
That's not even getting into the fact that windows 8 officially dropped digitizer/pen support (I tried to find the press release to this, but I think they pulled it when they announced the surface, this is the best I could find) microsoft.com [microsoft.com]
A gimped device, with half-assed pen support, of course they don't sell.
Re:Why should Lenovo support their main competitor (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm actually kind of surprised that companies like Lenovo, Dell, and HP haven't made any kind of overt move toward doing what Apple does-- taking a FOSS OS and building their own distro/OS off of it, customized to their marketing needs. If I were running one of these companies, the announcement of the Surface would have been a real shot-across-the-bow that would have me rethinking my whole relationship with Microsoft.
Luckily the Surface was kind of a flop too. If it were not a flop, though, I would expect Microsoft to eventually move toward making laptop/desktop models, as they saw a marketing opportunity, and maybe network/server hardware. With Microsoft producing the Surface and buying Nokia, also selling the XBox, it's looking increasingly like Microsoft wants to go the Apple route of selling integrated hardware/software solutions instead of selling a commodity OS to run on other vendors' hardware.
A couple years ago, I actually predicted that we'd see something like a Dell/Microsoft merger within 10 years, which would then have a vertical market containing everything that businesses need for computing. Between those two companies, you have phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, switches, routers, servers, and the software to run it all. We've seen no movement toward that, and I personally think it's a bad idea, but I think that's where Microsoft wants to go.
Win8 tablets suck (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking from personal experience in a smallish IT shop, non-RT Windows 8 tablets suck. Mainly this is because Microsoft hasn't figured out how to make updates really easy like on Android and iOS - it's basically the same updating experience as on a Win8 desktop, so every Patch Tuesday you've got several individual patches to download and install. Contrast this to how Android and iOS do it: downloading and installing one big update in the background and then prompting the user to reboot.
The problem is that our users don't install the updates. For example, I have three with Win8 tablets (only 3, thank $DEITY) purchased about a year ago. To modernize them, I had to download and install about 130 updates, reboot, go to the Store and tell it to install the upgrade to 8.1, reboot, install another 36 updates, reboot, and then upgrade a few desktop-type programs individually, reboot, and then I'm finally done. Yes, these tablets are on Active Directory, and no, I don't know why they're not getting updates from our WSUS server; my guess is that the tablets are used just a few hours a month for several minutes at a time. Anyway, the point is that keeping Windows 8 updated on a tablet is far more tedious and annoying than on a proper tablet OS.