14 DAY TRIAL // Lenovo is one of the greatest vendors of PCs and tablets, in some way the greatest, but even its plans don't always go perfectly well. Case in point, its sales plans in the United States have had to be changed, and some of them completely stopped.
Basically, the Chinese corporation will no longer be selling tablets with screens smaller than 9 inches in diagonal to customers from the United States of America.
The company has kept up its offering for a while, but has decided to stop doing so because of significantly lower consumer demand compared to large-size slates.
The ThinkPad 8 and the Miix 2 are the main casualties of this move. True, they will continue to sell in Japan, Brazil and China, or at least the ThinkPad 8 will, but soon in the future, US customers will not find it anymore.
Lenovo isn't even letting stores keep the inventories they already have, if we're reading this right. Instead, it is pulling the stocks and sending them to the other regions we mentioned.
For those wondering what could have caused the consumer disinterest, it isn't anything too bad. Just that US citizens seem to really prefer 10.1-inch screens or larger, no matter how similar the hardware of the smaller slates is.
For example, the ThinkPad 8 has an Intel Atom Z2770 central processing unit, 2 GB memory and 64 GB of NAND Flash storage, making it quite powerful, more powerful than a fair few 10.1-inch ones. It even has a 1920 x 1080 pixels screen (8.3 inches in diagonal).
Similarly, the Lenovo Miix 2 8 is an 8-inch slate (1280 x 800 pixels LCD) equipped with the Intel Atom Z3740 CPU, 2 GB memory and the same 64 GB storage capacity. Thus, it's a bit ahead of the ThinkPad 8, and also better aimed at consumers instead of business users.
Ironically enough, Microsoft stands to lose the most from this. Recently, it allowed Windows 8.1 to be installed on all tablets smaller than 9 inches for free, in an effort to get the public more familiar with it. It needed the leverage against Android.
Now, much of that leverage is gone, especially since other companies might take the cue from Lenovo and pull their small slates out as well. At the moment, Microsoft's online store still has the Lenovo ThinkPad 8 ($399 / €399) and the Miix 2 8 ($299 / €299) for sale, but there's no telling how much this will last.