Samsung has canceled plans to launch its line of Ativ Windows RT tablets in the U.S. A company executive, Mike Abary stated that the company’s Qualcomm-powered Windows RT tablet would not be released due to poor consumer demand. He told CNET in an interview;
“There wasn’t really a very clear positioning of what Windows RT meant in the marketplace, what it stood for relative to Windows 8, that was being done in an effective manner to the consumer. When we did some tests and studies on how we could go to market with a Windows RT device, we determined there was a lot of heavy lifting we still needed to do to educate the customer on what Windows RT was. And that heavy lifting was going to require pretty heavy investment. When we added those two things up, the investments necessary to educate the consumer on the difference between RT and Windows 8, plus the modest feedback that we got regarding how successful could this be at retail from our retail partners, we decided maybe we ought to wait.”
The non-release of a Windows RT device from Samsung ties in with reports of lukewarm sales of the Surface RT and the impending release of Surface Pro and a slew of Windows 8 tablets and convertibles from other vendors.
However, Samsung has gone forward with its Ativ Smart PC convertible model (shown above) running the full Windows 8 OS, and that system is widely available.
Only the Asus’ Vivo Tab RT was available at the time the Surface was launched in the U.S. Since then, only a small number of PC makers have joined the list, such as Lenovo’s with its IdeaPad Yoga 11 and Dell, with its XPS 10.
Samsung thus joins a list of other vendors like HP, who are waiting on the sidelines to see how demand for Windows 8 RT tablets plays out. Abary said that another of Samsung’s major concerns was being able to bring in an RT device at a competitive price point and that Samsung would have been forced to reduce the system’s base memory to achieve this.
He added that Samsung continues to monitor the market and does not preclude the release of a Windows 8 RT-based device at a future date.
