The company says that it will continue selling small tablets in the US

Jul 21, 2014 08:38 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft was about to lose another important partner in the United States, as Chinese manufacturer Lenovo last week rolled out a statement that made many believe that it’s ready to give up on small Windows in large markets such as the United States.

Lenovo was said to be using the low demand for such tablets as the main reason for its decision to stop selling the Miix 8 and the ThinkPad 8 devices in the United States, with a company official quoted as saying that Lenovo instead wants to focus on larger devices that have more potential to capture big sales.

In a statement released today, Lenovo says that this isn’t the case and that it will continue selling small tablets in the United States, explaining that all reports published by the media weren’t accurate.

“We will continue to bring new Windows devices to market across different screen sizes, including a new 8-inch tablet and 10-inch tablet coming this holiday,” the company said in a statement today.

“Our model mix changes as per customer demand, and although we are no longer selling ThinkPad 8 in the U.S., and we have sold out of Miix 8-inch, we are not getting out of the small-screen Windows tablet business as was reported by the media. In short, we will continue to sell both 8 and 10 inch Windows tablets in both the U.S. and non-U.S markets.”

Lenovo was not the only company that decided to stop Windows tablets in the United States, as Samsung recently pulled the plug on Windows RT devices in this particular market.

Samsung says that the confusion created by Windows RT devices, which are not capable of running full Windows applications, dramatically affected sales, so the company decided to stop selling such tablets in markets where devices running the full version of Windows are more attractive.

“When we did some tests and studies on how we could go to market with a Windows RT device, we determined there was a lot of heavy lifting we still needed to do to educate the customer on what Windows RT was. And that heavy lifting was going to require pretty heavy investment. When we added those two things up, the investments necessary to educate the consumer on the difference between RT and Windows 8, plus the modest feedback that we got regarding how successful could this be at retail from our retail partners, we decided maybe we ought to wait,” Samsung said earlier this year.