Otaku Gadgets

News has emerged from China that prolific tablet manufacturer Havnon has just entered a deal with software giant Microsoft. What they intend to do together is of course quite obvious — make space for MSFT in the fast thickening tablet soup that is the consumer tech industry right now.

Havnon and Microsoft together intend to design tablet that will be targeted primarily at business users. This also has a competitive edge to it because its main rival — Apple — has already taken the world by storm with its iPad and practically created/resurrected the tablet category. Google is also rumored to as developing it own tablet. In the mean time, every technology company and its sub-concern is making tablet/slate type devices of varying sizes.

In the face of such stiff competition, Microsoft can’t afford to be as late to the game as it was with its Windows Phone 7 Series. And those phones still haven’t the market yet. So late is actually an understatement for that situation.

Getting back to the deal, Microsoft has chosen (as per Shazai’s report) one of the best and most experienced x86 tablet manufacturers of China. The president of Havnon, Zhang Xuejun, has clearly stated that the tablet is a good business tool, as opposed to the belief that it is only good for content consumption and multimedia/entertainment.

Microsoft will most likely be using Windows 7 for their tablet as opposed to the popular practice of using mobile OS’s like the iOS in Apple’s case and the WebOS in HP/Palm’s case. Microsoft has been very bullish about Windows 7 being a very flexible and robust offering and that it can as easily work for tablets as it works for full-fledged desktop systems. Microsoft also pitched Windows 7 as a very potent business tool. So all of it fits into the larger scheme of things when they start planning to make tablets for business folks.

However, from our past experience, we can tell that x86 tablets have a tendency to falter at the performance to battery life ratio. If there’s one thing tablets are preferred for it is their advanced portability. If this is hampered by a short battery life, the product will not stand a chance.

The most power efficient choice for x86 manufacturers is obviously the Atom series. But even Intel acknowledges that they are nowhere nearly as power efficient as ARM chips. ARM chips like the A4 inside the iPad or the SnapDragon from Qualcomm — offer a large amount of processing power at a very low rate of power consumption. Latest SoC’s have also improved on graphics capabilities of these devices.

Comparing these to the x86 chips shows a wide gap in performance. Hence, how Microsoft bridges this gap with their offering or whether they can do it at all — is something that remains to be seen.

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