Dell thinks it can make a buck off Windows 8 tablets, despite the fact that it pretty much abandoned its Android tablets last year.
Dell’s Chief Commercial Officer Steve Felice said this week that he thinks disaffection with iPads by corporate IT departments creates an opportunity to sell mobile devices that run on Windows – something they are familiar with.
“On the commercial side there are a lot of concerns about security, interoperability, systems and device management, and I think Dell is in the best position to meet those,” Felice saiys.
In addition to taking a run at Windows 8 Dell may also fire up its Android tablets again, but that is to be seen. “We have a roadmap for tablets that we haven’t announced yet,” he says. “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.”
Two postings by Microsoft indicate that it’s not only inevitable that tablets based on Windows 8 be compared to iPads, Microsoft is actually encouraging the comparison. First, the company supports a Web page that instructs Windows 8 developers how to reshape their iPad apps into Metro style apps, and points to a site that details how much they can get paid for those apps. It also touts certain Metro navigation and control features as being superior to those employed by Apple.
The second posting on the Building Windows 8 blog outlines the screen resolutions that Windows 8 tablets can support. It turns out the maximum screen resolution is higher than that for the new iPad and its famous Retina display. The post is about how to write Metro apps so they look good on any screen size with any resolution above minimum Windows 8 requirements, but it’s hard to miss that the maximum resolution (291 ppi) is greater than the new iPad’s (265).
