14 DAY TRIAL // Nowadays, so-called Wintel tablets aren't really seen in such a favorable light, being overshadowed by the overall better Android-loaded ARM ones, but this might change once 2012 comes around.
Apple's iPad, and, thus, the tablet market, came to be at what can be seen as an inopportune time for Intel and Microsoft.
Mostly, the fact was that neither company had the needed technology and products to produce a tablet capable of rivaling the iPad.
The fact that the ARM architecture did spawn working platforms, like the NVIDIA Tegra 2 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon, also didn't paint a favorable picture for Wintel slates.
Granted, some Atom-powered models with Windows 7 do exist, but they haven't really managed to gain a following.
On the flip side, current slates, or at least some of them, have been finding the ARM/Android combination to be slightly lacking in performance, since expectations aren't always being met.
Granted, applications like the Zinio app do exist, and are, to some extent, successful in optimizing everything, leading to smoother page turns and the like, but people still want an even better experience.
Nevertheless, Intel and Microsoft have no intention of giving up any time soon, having supposedly decided to put together a new platform.
They want to develop a hardware-software combination that can let the CPU work on just 5W of power when running the Windows 8 operating system.
The project is expected to come to fruition in 2012, meaning that it is in about a year's time, give or take a few months, that round two will start.
Then again, Intel chips already support the Android OS, while Microsoft's Windows 8 will be compatible with the ARM processor architecture.
In other words, there should be a greater intercompatibility so a real two-sides battle between Wintel and ARM-Android slates might not turn out to be so intense as one would suspect.