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Samsung Won't Release Windows RT Tablet In US
New submitter sandoval88419 writes "During CES the U.S. head of Samsung Tablet business announced they won't release Windows RT devices in the U.S. Explanations are low demand, heavy investment to educate the consumer on the differences between windows RT and 8 and more importantly the effort to keep a low retail price with the Microsoft offering. "
Not that I wanted Windows RT
I heard they'd cost an ARM and a leg...
Funny the Slashdot community skipped right over the news Microsoft sold 60 million licenses so far. this place really is the fox news of tech.
You don't become the leading smartphone manufacturer by being a sucker.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I thought it was clear enough that Windows RT is to be the Windows version for ARM tablet devices that will compete directly with iPad and Android tablets.
What's not clear about it. Looks like Samsung is strong-arming Microsoft for something else.
none
Win 8 is Microsoft's doom, Apple is closing up their machines, will Linux finally rise to the desktop occasion and save us all?
heavy investment to educate the consumer on the differences between windows RT and 8
I still think it was an absurdly foolish decision not to make Windows 8 and Windows RT obviously and distinctly separate products. Call it Windows Tablet or something. Even for people who do know the difference (8 = 7 with a wider start menu, RT = locked down tablet OS), you often need to drill down to the 'tech specs' page when looking at tablets in order to tell whether it has a useful OS or not.
Now how many convertibles were there? Every big store I've been too have about as many convertible windows 8 machines as they do other 10" tablets. If you're charging $680 for Core i tablet, you may as well make it $700 and add a foldable or detachable keyboard.
From what I gather, the budget x86 Windows 8 tablets having been waiting on the new low power atoms
Grandma bought Microsoft Office and it says right on the box "designed for Windows 8". She bought a Windows 8 machine from you. Explain to grandma how she didn't just get ripped off. Remember she has no clue what "x86" is.
Further, explain to ANYONE why they should spend $400 on a WinRT tablet that's less functional than a $180 Android tablet.
Until very recently computing has all been utilising the benefits of this year's more powerful and more resource hungry x86 processor. Relatively cheap laptops are more powerful than supercomputers 15 years ago but the user experience is not particularly more responsive because software gets increasingly bloated.
ARM devices are really a different proposition, on the plus side they have no moving parts and a long battery life, however they are a very different architecture to x86, and making the OS perform well requires lots of differences. Linux (and therefore android too) was always built to be a modular system and one thing it does well is support different platforms with many compatible but swappable components at every level. The world's top supercomputers and the £25 Raspberry Pi both happily run Linux.
Windows is very different. It is a set of very tightly integrated libraries, which has its benefits, but they all need to be scaled down to work on ARM, you cannot just swap out some resource hungry component for some open source project because the system is so interdependent. Scaling down software is much harder than scaling it up.
Therefore I am not suprised that Samsung found Windows' ARM version slow and resource hungry. Just because Windows dominated the x86 era, it does not mean it will be suitable for the new and disruptive ARM age.
My little Linux and tech blog
Actually, aside from the US, why would Samsung even do an RT tablet anywhere, when they have one of the most successful Android products in both the Galaxy phone & the Galaxy tab?
If they wanted, it might make sense for them to do an Atom/Fusion based Windows 8 tablet, and that would probably be the only good platform for Windows 8 in that it will be able to run Wintel apps as well.
Windows RT will be an even bigger fiasco than either Windows NT on RISC (Alpha, MIPS) or Windows Server 2008 on Itanium ever was.
I recently purchased a Samsung ATIV Smart PC at Best Buy for $699.
It has an Intel Cedar Trail processor and runs full Windows 8.
It's very fast, has amazing battery life and it can run literally **Millions** of programs.
For $200 more, it's a no brainer.
What is there is a reduced functionality subset that has the same name just to confuse you.
Samsung is not bringing the latest Galaxy either because of Apple. Sometimes losing is cheaper than fighting in court as Apple are frankly assholes who already sued and won $ 1,000,000,000 judgement already. The shareholders will not put up with that anymore.
If this is not proof that Apple is far more evil than MS I do not know what is. At least in 2013 my anti-MS zealotry I had 12 years ago is gone. I used to post comments opposite of what I write today about the evils of MS.
But today I want to see more WindowsRT tablets to keep Android, IOS, and Webkit in check for a healthier marketplace. I doubt MS will be what it once was with this competition but I believe we all benefit even if we are loyal IOS or Android users.
A shame as Samsung made fine phones and tablets
http://saveie6.com/
$200? The average selling price is $799. Yeah, you can get it at AT and T for 100 dollars less with a two year contract! They are not cheap!
OEM buys the licenses beforehand.
All MS has to do is say "Ok, instead of having 1 months supply of Windows 8 licenses I need you to buy 5 months ahead of time!"
Then MS releases a press release saying "OMG DEMAND FOR WINDOWS 8 WENT UP 500%!" Intentionally, exgerated of course but that is my point. We all know the accounting tricks of Vista numbers where people and businesses bought them but wiped them and downgraded to XP.
Online website counters are the real way to predict adoption. If anyone is interested in the real number of people *actually using* windows 8 click here from statcounter who checks millions of websites each day? Windows 8 was 2% the last I looked. In comparison Windows 7 jumped 3x more in the same time period 3 years ago!
In otherwords it is a dud.
http://saveie6.com/
If you dump mass licenses of W8 to OEMs with W7 downgrade rights this is going to happen. They save up millions of licenses and bring down their costs - they have to to remain competitive. But this has nothing to do with which version of the software gets delivered to the customer, nor how popular it is.
Go to dell.com or HP.com and look at their premium desktops. Windows 7 gets top billing still and Windows 8 is an option. In HP's case there are more preconfigured options with SUSE Linux than Windows 8. In Dell's case not one system comes with Windows 8 by default.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Pretty sure it'd be at best 5th. RIM and Symbian might be dying but WinRT was stillborn
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
2.89% as of today. According to stat counter, windows 8 is growing at about the same rate windows 7 was growing in the month leading up to oct 26 (a little faster actually). Since oct 26 windows 7 has been declining. So much for the theory that everyone is buying windows 8 machines and downgrading. These stats also include all the hundreds of millions of computers sold since 2009, growth in internet traffic, as well as iPad and android stats. So how many machines is 2.89%? We don't know. But it's clear windows 8 is growing and growing steadily, no matter the naysaying here on slashdot.
Wait, what?
Does that orange line look like "declining" to you?. And Win8 is lumped together with "Others" at 3%.
Dude, I can see you're an MS zealot from your posts history, but at least try bullshitting about something less easily verifiable.
Samsung thinks that Americans are too stupid
Yes, it is has been declining since Oct 26. Here is how the data looks on a daily basis: http://i.imgur.com/hNPSv.png
The blue line is before Windows 8 launch, the red line is after. Windows 7 was at an all time weekly high the week of Oct 26, when Windows 8 was launched. It's been going down steadily since then (minus some distortion due to holidays, but it's now just about back on the original trajectory started on Oct 26).
As for Windows 8, the stats are broken down when you download the CSV data.
Should you use the term "no brainer" to describe a computer? Doesn't that defeat the point?
Microsoft is releasing their new Surface devices in the wrong order. Instead of bringing RT devices to market, and then Windows 8, they should've ONLY released full Windows 8 devices, let people become familiar with the dual paradigm, waited for the app store to fill up nicely, THEN came out with the RT devices, which would be much more appealing if they had plenty of software available, and if people were already accustomed to getting things done in RT mode.
As things are now, RT has been tainted, possibly irreparably. Maybe it could be saved if it had the ability to run Windows Phone 8 apps. Why that was not part of the plan seems like a huge failure to me.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
One has a Windows operating system, the other has a Windows operating system. So yes, I have good reason to expect the desktop app to run on the tablet. Unless they don't share an architecture, of course. But do I know about architectures?
Not all games for the original Xbox run on Xbox 360 because of the different architecture. Microsoft tried to push out emulators to run the popular ones, but it never achieved more than about half coverage. And only those PlayStation 3 consoles sold soon after launch can run PlayStation 2 games.
The obvious solution is to call the ARM version Doors 8, which gives you a better idea of the kind of functionality to expect. iOS only got away with having OS in the name because Apple was the first to market a mobile rape me in the ass store.
...didn't you notice (while you were so blatantly trying to copy Apple) that Apple didn't try to create a version of iOS for the Mac?
(insert sadtrombone.mp3)
Because they are working on Tizen based ones...with an illusion it will sell.
Symbian isn't dead... only recently has Samsung exceeded Nokia's sales, and Nokia still sells more handsets than Apple. Even in smartphone sales (a subset of cellphone sales), Nokia isn't far behind Samsung and Apple.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/416666/20121219/samsung-tops-mobile-phone-market-2012-nokia.htm
Issue with iPad minis is that they are priced no differently from iPads. Seriously, why should one pay the same price for both? In fact, how superior is the iPad Mini to the iPod Touch? If Apple could discover a sweet spot between iPad minis and iPod Touches, those would probably be more popular. Only problem - they would more likely erode either the iPad market or the iPod Touch market. Or both.
Yeah but nokia pretty much are phasing out whatevers left of that line in the bargain basement. Developers hate it, and nokia goofily threw all sorts of roadblocks in the way of adopting that god forsaken OS anyway. Heck the way things are looking ,other than the odd delusional pundit who still thinks blackberry is going to make a triumphunt return, Nokia will probably be on the droid bandwagon too soon anyway.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
...and yet despite all its flaws and whatever nokia is doing, it still sells like hotcakes