Dell hasn’t been doing particularly well in transitioning from being a PC vendor to a company who ships PCs as well as tablets. Particularly, it hasn’t seen any significant success on the tablet front. In a recent interview to Reuters, Dell’s chief commercial officer, Steve Felice said that there is still a lot of room in the tablet market and Dell may plan a come-back with Windows 8 tablets as well as Android tablets.
It would seem that like some other tablet vendors, Dell is contemplating the possibility of success in the tablet market with a Windows 8 tablet. Particularly, Dell may be banking on the touch capabilities of Windows 8. According to Felice, “We’re very encouraged by the touch capability we are seeing in the beta versions of Windows 8.” But at the same time, he adds that Dell hasn’t ruled out Android and may still also make Android tablets again.
So when may we hear a definite plan from Dell and know for sure whether it is going with the Windows 8 tablet or an Android tablet or both? ‘We have a roadmap for tablets that we haven’t announced yet. You’ll see some announcements.. for the back half of the year. We don’t think that this market is closed off in any way’ is what Felice thinks. He is definitely right about the tablet market being still open since with millions of users flocking to tablets every month, there’s room for plenty of vendors to succeed, with the right offerings.
One very significant point of Dell’s strategy to crack the tablet nut would be to utilize its relationship with its thousands of business customers, which vary from corporate individuals to organizations. Felice says that this can translate into a real advantage Dell has over Apple. And being a very successful PC vendor, Dell can actually make very effective use of this by pushing out a prospective new tablet to these business customers.
But it seems that Dell doesn’t want to developer just another tablet. The company intends to develop a tablet-cum-laptop which can be a real alternative to a PC. ‘When people put their computer to the side and take their iPad with them to travel, you see a lot of compromises being made’ says Felice. And to bring both convenience and computing power to a tablet would require Dell to really come up with something entirely new and innovative.
Image courtesy BestBoyz.
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