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Intel Relying On Ice Cream Sandwich For Tablet Push
An anonymous reader writes "Intel thinks tablets live and die by their software, not their hardware. So as they get ready for a big push into the mobile device market, they're relying on Ice Cream Sandwich to provide competition with Apple's products. From the article: 'The company has largely watched from the sidelines as mobile device makers have used processors based on ARM's microarchitecture to power their products in recent years. This despite the fact that Intel actually predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs, several years ago, and built a chip, Atom, for such gadgets. For all that [Intel CEO Paul Otellini] touts the software over the hardware when it comes to tablets, Intel knows it's got a lot of ground to make up to wrest design wins away from ARM. The Medfield System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is a promising but still uncertain step in that direction.' Otellini thinks the tablet market will get much more competitive over the next year as ICS devices mature and Windows 8 devices arrive."
And this is exactly the attitude that landed MS on last place on the mobile market. Calling its potential users morons and retards for wanting a sloppy dumbed-down UI, when in reality they were just average users who wanted a simple interface.
It doesn't matter when WinCE was around when it didn't deliver what people wanted.
What?
They were also all based on resistive screens, as capacitive screens weren't around then (I think - at least I never saw one). Resistive screens are rather uncomfortable to use due to the need to apply considerable pressure, but they do have the advantage of allowing for greater precision with a pen than a cap screen and a squishy finger.
Not only PC vendors, but even most Android manufacturers ain't gonna prefer Intel to ARM, unless Intel can demonstrate lower power consumption AND greater performance @ the same time. And they'll have no reason to - all the apps already there for Android are Android on ARM. Plus you have a rich ecosystem of ARM manufacturers - Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, et al.
If you're not going to consider a Wintel tablet, there is really no reason to look @ Intel. The only thing Intel brings to the table is w/ Windows 8, where there is at least the theoretical possibility of running legacy software on it.
WinCE delivered professional grade suckiness - frequent crashes with data loss, and no upgrades to fix bugs at all. It looked like a scam to me. Professional non-tech people who used it against the advice of IT people (because it was "windows") were horrified at how crap it was, and could not wait to ditch it.
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