Some brand vendors might be looking to refocus their interests on smartphones

Nov 22, 2013 07:29 GMT  ·  By

The war for supremacy in the tablet business is a fierce one and companies like Apple and Samsung are running the game, with other players struggling to make room for themselves.

A new report coming out of DigiTimes shows that some manufacturers have apparently lost hope when tablets are concerned and are willing to back away from the business.

According to industry sources familiar with the matter, manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and BlackBerry could soon abandon tablet endeavors, due to increase competition in the field, especially in the lower end sector. Companies like Acer, ASUS, Lenovo and Samsung are offering tablet models with price tags lower than $200 / €148 so the competition is getting stronger.

Samsung has recently made public that it plans to focus more on tablets than on smartphones, in the year to come and is expected to release a flurry of slates aimed to cover all consumer bases. The Korean tech giant is already rumored to be working on 12.2-inch and 13.3-inch models.

This means that in 2014 we’re going to see more competition from established tablet brand vendors. BlackBerry has mostly focused its efforts in pushing smartphones to business users and its tablet device, the PlayBook wasn't even considered for upgrade to the new operating system.

Tablets or not, BlackBerry business is not thriving at all, as most of its business clients have turned their attention to Apple’s products and others.

HTC is in the same boat here, seeing its smartphone sales fall. However, in a recent interview last month, the company CEO mentioned that the company might be working on a tablet of sort, said to be “nice and disruptive.”

The report went on to claim that not all companies are willing to renounce the tablet game. Nokia, LG and Sony are still pretty active in the market. The first two tech companies have recently unveiled tablet offerings and are expected to keep doing so in the future. Actually, Nokia has been reported to be working on its next Windows 8 device, this time an 8-inch slate with Windows RT 8.1 pegged for a Q1 2014 release.