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ASUS says it will abandon Windows RT tablet market

by Mark Tyson on 12 August 2013, 12:15

Tags: ASUSTeK (TPE:2357)

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ASUS, a major Microsoft hardware partner, will abandon Windows RT devices for the foreseeable future. ASUS Chief Executive Jerry Shen told the Wall Street Journal the news on Friday following the computer maker's post earnings investor conference.

The ASUS Windows RT tablets which have been available (namely the VivoTab RT) have suffered from weak sales, said Shen. Also he told the WSJ that the company took a write-down on its Windows RT tablets in Q2 though declined to name a figure. "It's not only our opinion, the industry sentiment is also that Windows RT has not been successful," noted Shen. This news was hinted at last week when ASUS chairman Jonney Shih told AllThingsD that Windows RT's outlook was "not very promising" and said he would be focussing time and energy on Intel devices only, which offer backwards compatibility with Windows desktop applications.

Since Windows RT's launch many hardware makers have watched from the sidelines and then decided not to launch any devices. Companies such as Samsung, HTC and Nokia are included in that list. It seems like only Dell and Lenovo are left along with Microsoft itself.

That Windows RT is a bit of a damp squib does seem to be quite a commonly held belief with really only Microsoft and Nvidia talking it up right now. Furthermore Windows 8 on Intel tablets doesn't seem to be that popular, only last week we heard about Acer choosing to expand its offerings based on Google produced OSes while it simultaneously slashed the price of its Iconia W3 tablet.

Meanwhile ASUS continues to have success in making and selling Android based tablets, both its own models and the Google Nexus line. According to recent leaks it is pretty certain that the new Nexus 10 model will be made by ASUS, Samsung was the previous Nexus 10 tablet partner/maker.



HEXUS Forums :: 17 Comments

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“Shocking” - said nobody.

We just don't need RT when there are perfectly good Atom based Windows x86 tablets, cheaper tablets with Android etc
Indeed… I just can't see RT lasting much longer
I never saw the point of RT with Pro coming up behind it and the multitude of alternatives… and then they announced the price, and that even put Pro out of the equation. The products might have been amazing, but they weren't offered at a competitive or seductive price, and they didn't offer anything substantively different from what's already out there.
i was going to get a windows tab but there's no point in the rt and the pro are to expensive i can go and get a cheap laptop for a hell of a lot less or even better keep using my smart phone to get on to facebook twitter youtube as thats all i would use a tab for
This has got me thinking. The Iconia W3 running proper Windows 8 is only £329 at Argos now and with the 20% Acer announced that's then down to less than £270. In which case how cheap are RT devices going to have to be to shift? Granted the Iconia doesn't have the tablet edition of Office that the RT devices have, on the other hand it's not exactly going to be difficult to slap on a copy of Libre (disk space permitting) and use a uSD for file storage.

Or even use it as a testbed for touch-driven Ubuntu after having removed the Windows 8 install… ;) After all, a 64GB root disk is spacious for Ubuntu - heck, system I'm typing this on only has 30GB used, so perhaps even a 32GB W3 would be barely viable.