Dell to launch Windows 8 tablet in early 2012
A leaked roadmap from Dell shows that the company has a tablet with Windows 8 in the pipeline for the first quarter of 2012. The company will also launch several Android, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 devices this year.
The website wpcentral.com was given roadmaps showing which smartphones and tablets Dell plans to release in the near future. It is striking that the company has planned a 10 “tablet with Windows 8 as operating system for the first quarter of 2012. Microsoft has so far revealed little about the successor to Windows 7. For now, it is only known that the interface of the operating system should are for tablets and that the OS can also run on ARM processors.A release in the first quarter of 2012 would mean that there is a little more than two years between Windows 7 and 8, well less than the three years between Windows Vista and Windows 7.
In addition to the Windows 8 tablet, the roadmaps show some other new products that Dell has in the pipeline. For example, the company will come with two new Windows Phone 7 devices by the summer, one of which would run the next-gen version of the OS. Presumably, Dell here refers to the first major update of the OS, which will be rolled out this year. The company also comes around the turn of the year with two phones that are equipped with Android Ice Cream. Codenamed Hancock and Millennium, the devices both feature dual-core SOCs, qHD resolution screens, 8-megapixel cameras and the ability to handle 1080p video. Hancock is also equipped with a slide-out qwerty keyboard.
In the tablet area, Dell is investing heavily in Android; the roadmap shows eight models running on Google’s mobile OS and only one with Windows 7. In addition to the already announced Streak 7, between the second quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, five tablets with 5″ screen diagonals are to be delivered. ” and 10″ will be released with Android Honeycomb. This will probably be adjusted for the 2012 models, as Google is expected to have already released a successor to Honeycomb by then.