Bloomberg has reported that Taiwan’s HTC Corporation has cancelled its full-sized Windows RT tablet production plans. “People familiar with the matter” said that concerns over weak demand prompted HTC management to cancel an upcoming 12-inch screened tablet using the Microsoft Windows RT operating system.
One of Bloomberg’s insider sources said that HTC has canned the 12-inch device because of a combination of weak demand and the projected cost of its production being quite high. Of course these costs would have had to have been passed onto the customer which made the overall package an unattractive one. HTC’s current tight financial situation means that it has to be much more selective and conservative about the products it brings to market.
While this interestingly large 12-inch Windows RT tablet looks like it will never see the light outside of HTC’s R&D department Bloomberg reports that a 7-inch RT tab will make it out of the door later this year. It is hoped that the limited success of the Windows RT tablets made and sold so far by various other manufacturers will be eclipsed by the smaller and cheaper Windows RT tablets which should emerge around September or October. By that time an update to Windows RT may well have been delivered, allowing devices with lesser screen resolutions to make use of Windows RT's split screen multitasking capabilities.
Two other information nuggets from the Bloomberg story are that the 7-inch HTC tablet with Windows RT will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and that a very similar Android tablet will be released at the same time as the version sporting Microsoft’s ARM-friendly OS. (both OSes in the one tablet would be nice)
It’s still interesting to read all these stories of companies feeling impending doom as far as Windows RT is concerned compared with the commonly found stories of the wondrous world and impressive momentum of the Google Chromebook. However usage figures revealed last month show that Windows RT has been more successful in its initial 6 months of availability than ChromeOS during approximately 2 years of availability.
