Such tablets are considerably less powerful and less featured than TabletPCs

Oct 1, 2012 06:55 GMT  ·  By

Numerous tablet companies, especially the major OEMs are gearing up to conquer the enterprise tablet market. The only problem is that this specific market sector doesn’t really exist and its success is debatable right now.

Enterprise or business oriented tablets have been on the market for quite a while, but those were either TabletPC or rugged tablets with special features.

We don’t include TabletPCs in this category as we don’t consider a TabletPCs to be the same with a tablet.

Therefore, excluding powerful TabletPCs, we are left with some rugged tablets based on Android or Windows7 that have been present on the market for quite some time, but almost none from major OEMs such as DELL, HP or others.

The big companies are now trying to give birth to a real business tablet that has no rugged features and it’s not a convertible TabletPC with a powerful processor and all the necessary requirements that a regular PC has.

These business or enterprise tablets that have been presented once Intel introduced its Clover Trail platform are mainly capable of running everything a Windows 8 32-bit PC can run, but without the performance that a regular PC has and lacking functional units as an HDD or an ODD.

Tablets do differentiate themselves from PCs and TabletPCs by having a significantly long battery life, a modest weight and the lower performance along with the missing internal units are clear concept design choices.

Therefore, most of the Clover Trail tablets, enterprise or not, will probably not have features like waterproofing or shock resistance as rugged tablets nor will they have the performance of a TabletPC.

These tablets will be Android counterparts that are running on Intel’s Atom or AMD’s Hondo instead of ARM processors and have complete x86 / Windows 32-bit software compatibility.

This backwards software compatibility is the main feature in the eyes of Intel and the big OEM companies and they believe that this will be enough to give birth to a business / enterprise tablet market.

Sure, there will be some other trinkets added to the “business” tablet such as a replaceable battery or a fingerprint reader, but no one really knows if this will be enough to create and develop such a market sector.