Michael Dell, the CEO of a corporation that produces some of the most boring consumer electronics hardware in the industry and who is desperately trying to eat some of HP’s share in the enterprise space, recently earned himself the title of “Master of the Obvious” by saying this at the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit:
“If you look at the tablet market, you have to say right now it’s an iPad market. The Android stuff has not done fantastically well, I think I’m being fair. Microsoft has a pretty good shot with Windows 8, we’re pretty excited with what they’re doing.”
As much as we want to yell at the top of our lungs that someone who is in a position to say something about the industry shares the same opinion we’ve held since the Motorola Xoom started landing in people’s hands earlier this year, we would also like to remind you that this is the same guy who said Apple would go bankrupt and that they should just give investors their money back.
Will Ice Cream Sandwich, Google’s latest version of Android that was announced just a few short hours ago in Hong Kong, change things? It’s tough to say since we haven’t seen any Ice Cream Sandwich tablets announced, but we’re pretty sure we’ll see some either at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of next year or Mobile World Congress just a short month later.
Now as for Windows 8, we need to see it on something using ARM before we can say anything. The Developer Preview that’s currently available for download is buggy as hell and only runs on x86. We know NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm have committed to supporting Windows 8, now we just have to see manufacturers take those chips and build something that competes with the iPad not only on price, but also on build quality and design.
[Photo Credit: Flickr]