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Lenovo Halts Sales of Small-Screen Windows 8.1 Tablets Due To "Lack of Interest"
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.
I halted buying of Windows 8x machines through lack of interest as well. That and disgust at how diabolical the UI is.
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
A gimped device, with half-assed pen support, of course they don't sell.
That those less usable tablets have had "some success in Brazil, China, and Japan"? Do you hate the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Japanese?
With Surface, it seems Microsoft is a bigger threat to Lenovo than Dell, HP, IBM, etc.
With that in mind, I can't imagine why they'd support any Windows platforms.
It seems that adding Metro UI to Windows 8 has resulted in their tablets and phones going from 1% to 2%. Was the whole exercise worth it?
Yeah, the second MS announced their Surface devices, the first thing I thought of was "well, that's every single PC maker now in competition with MS, and MS doesn't play well with others if history is anything to go by" Got a Dell Venue Pro when it first came out cheap, to have a play. And after a few bios upgrades, 8.1 upgrade, constant windows updates, driver upgrades, it's almost workable. Pick it up, let it install the updates, and in 10minutes or so after powering up and eventually locking onto the local network signal (that the very last update seemed to fix), it's good to go! And then... Even skipping the horrendous UI, that's clunky on the small screen, it simply doesn't feel as 'quality' as the Nexus7 I also use. Windows, use it on the laptops/desktops/servers, it works and works well, but for tablets, it's still stuck in that odd twilight of functionality that means it's not perfect for anything. Ok, there's going to be some sales for people who want to access MS Office files on a tablet? No, I don't think there really will be that many. And if you DID want that functionality, the 'safe' choice is going to be a MS laptop/Surface device. So I totally get why Win tablet sales are next to non-existent, and why makers of these devices are going to flee the platform and follow the rush to the bottom of other Android maker devices.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
I think some of the smaller Miix and similar devices are less useful for some clear reasons:
I think Windows tablet / hybrids or 10, 11 or 12 sizes are far more viable, particularly for people who have to actually do work on the go but appreciate being able to flip their sideways and use them as a tablet for some mindless browsing or whatever.
The Surface line is no threat. I'm typing this on an Asus Vivobook S200E ultraportable (i3-3217U, 4GB, 11.6", aluminum chassis, USB 3.0, $430 new + $80 more for a nice SATA-III SSD to upgrade with; basically what I call a "better MacBook Air than a MacBook Air") that makes a Surface Pro look like total garbage and is almost the same physical size. Laptops continue to be the king of "I actually have work to get done" portable computing larger than a smartphone. Tablets trying to be laptops are just plain junk, especially when you drop the "Pro" and just get a Surface that can't run anything useful at all other than a browser.
I'm waiting for the Surface thing to fade away. I'm surprised it sticks around at all; it's about time for an HP TouchPad-style fire sale. *stares at watch*
And Microsoft seems to just love, and perhaps even encourage this particular confusion. In fact their poor branding would seem to have been deliberately designed to cause confusion leading to people buying an RT device and then discovering that it doesn't really run Windows apps. It only runs the tiny library of Windows 8 RT apps.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Lenovo is a Chinese maker.
And they are offering these at low prices -- in the developing world -- because nobody in the western world wants this Windows 8 crap.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The closest thing to concrete data about that whole situation could accurately describe:
-Agency plugs in lenovo laptop with preload intact
-Agency notes that a TCP SYN packet was sent to China, but not allowed to actually get there.
-Agency says 'screw it' and bans it without further analysis
This could be nefarious or it could be checking for firmware or driver updates. There's no way to guess what really happened without details of any investigation coming to light.
Keep in mind that it was likely an activity driven by some agenda. Notably, these agencies start from a perspective of 'distrust china' and consider it their job to prevent that vendor selling into agencies. So they seek the flimsiest reason to hold up to impose a ban, which no one really objects too hard to since it's politically better to not source from China anyway. The agencies may not have detected a real threat, but they likely presume a real threat is a significant possibility that they have no way of practically detecting, so they run with this.
If there was an unambiguous backdoor seen, you bet your ass the agencies would be shouting from the rooftops. Instead, they are doing enough to keep it away from sensitive areas, but not so much to invite much scrutiny.
Finally, if China *really* wants backdoors, they don't need to actually have even slight ownership of the company. All the big companies gleefully hand over pretty much full control of their manufacturing and much of their hardware design, software, and firmware development to China anyway. The nationality of the CEO means approximately nothing in the scheme of state sponsored espionage.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
>> That plus the fact that Linux lacks 3rd party app support
No.
3rd party apps lack linux support.
aaaaaaa
Modern UI sucks on the Venue 8 pro as well. The main problem is that desktop apps dont talk to metro apps. So clicking OneNote in desktop is different than clicking OneNote on Metro. They act as if they are 2 separate apps glued together by OneDrive. ON a single system that is plain retarded. Metro is pointless and uselss. Even on the 8" screen i would rather deal with KNOWN desktop apps with the pen than shitty metro apps with my finger..
Good-bye