14 DAY TRIAL // Hewlett Packard is one of the manufacturers set to bring to the market tablet PCs running under Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 platform.
The company’s CEO Meg Whitman confirmed this in a recent interview with CRN, but did not offer specific info on when devices might hit stores.
One thing that she did confirm, however, was that products featuring the x86 architectures will be released before ARM-based ones.
“We have to have a tablet offering. We will be back in that business. We're coming back into the market with a Windows 8 tablet, first on an x86 chip and then maybe on an ARM chip,” she said.
Tablet PCs will help the company remain at the top of the PC market, though Meg Whitman is confident that the vendor could remain a leader even without such a device. “We'll see. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to do that,” she said.
What remains unclear at the moment is when the Windows 8 platform arrive with support for ARM tablets, Whitman said: “Windows 8, we don’t know when the delivery is for that software on an ARM chip.”
Recent reports suggested that Microsoft was actually advancing nicely with the development of Windows 8 on ARM, and that the software could be pushed to shelves with the platform for x86 devices.
However, it has been long said that ARM tablet PCs to run under the Windows 8 platform will not be released before the end of this year, while Intel-based devices will hit shelves in Q4.
Meg Whitman’s sayings appear to confirm the fact that ARM devices running Windows 8 will be released at a later date.
Microsoft has yet to confirm any details on the availability of Windows 8 devices. The company might do so later this month, when the beta flavor of the operating system becomes publicly available.
Those who would like get a taste of Windows 8 can download the Developer Preview Build 8102 M3 from Softpedia via this link.