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.

Comments

Same here

[Anonymous Coward]

I halted buying of Windows 8x machines through lack of interest as well. That and disgust at how diabolical the UI is.

Re:Same here

[Zuriel]

The thing that bothers me the most about Windows 8 is that Microsoft didn't include the Metro UI because they thought it was better than the old UI.

Everyone can point at an OS which changed its UI in a way they don't like. The thing is, those changes usually happen because the developers genuinely believe that the new UI is better than the old one. Sometimes the developers are right, sometimes they're not. They might make a mistake, but they're trying to improve their product.

Windows 8's Metro UI, on the other hand, isn't there because anyone at Microsoft thought Windows 8 users would like it. That's what bugs me. It's there to build familiarity with that UI, in the hopes that people will go out and buy Windows phones. That's why you can't just turn it off - Microsoft management wants Metro in your face so you'll then go and buy a phone or tablet with that familiar UI that you already know how to use.

It's about using dominance over one market to elbow their way into a different market.

Atom = worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why and how is it "fortunate"?

[demon driver]

That those less usable tablets have had "some success in Brazil, China, and Japan"? Do you hate the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Japanese?

Re:Why and how is it "fortunate"?

[paiute]

That those less usable tablets have had "some success in Brazil, China, and Japan"? Do you hate the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Japanese?

Studies have shown that these three countries have a high number of tables with uneven legs.

Re: Why and how is it "fortunate"?

[DickBreath]

They have to firesale those devices in developing countries. In the US, the EPA isn't going to let them just bury them in a big hole in the ground. The Windows 8 software might leak into the soil causing a massive ecological disaster.

Why should Lenovo support their main competitor?

[ron_ivi]

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.

Re:Was it worth it?

[MachineShedFred]

Or, was half the remaining Blackberry customer base simply tricked into buying something else that sucks?

Re:Why should Lenovo support their main competitor

[nctritech]

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*

Re: Not usable

[DickBreath]

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.

Re:Why should Lenovo support their main competitor

[nine-times]

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

[Nimey]

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.