Hardware
Putting the Brakes on Ballmer’s Tablet Announcement?
This may be FUD, or the previous leak about Ballmer making a Tablet announcement in his keynote at CES2010 may be FUD. Who knows? Maybe Stebe Ballmer is biting his tongue or has his tongue in his cheek. But a little birdy, (that would be Rob Bushway) pinged a source at Microsoft who offered the following:
“I can’t confirm any details about the rumored project to which you are referring but I can say that we won’t be making any news tonight in the keynote along these lines.
Beyond this, we don’t have any further information to share, but invite you to check out all information that will be shared during tonight’s keynote at www.microsoft.com/ces.”
So, don’t count your Tablets before they are hatched, or some other fowl metaphor that might work.
Loren Heiny
01/06/2010 at 1:01 pm
There goes my theory that HP cloned the Apple tablet even before it was out and was ready to ship with Windows Mobile 7 and Project Natal. ;-)
Paul Harrigan
01/06/2010 at 1:28 pm
Yeah, I expect the HP tablet that Ballmer uses will either be an old TC1100 or one of the current ones on the market (a TM2?).
Tracy
01/06/2010 at 1:41 pm
Hah, I like the Ballmer picture. I was starting to get excited about tablets again (a new slate?!) but I guess I’ll hold off until I’m certain. I’m cheering on Loren’s theory though, just because that’d be awesome.
Rob Bushway
01/06/2010 at 2:22 pm
I still think there will be an HP tablet demo, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Courier, which is likely what the spokesperson was referring to.
Ryan Jacob
01/06/2010 at 3:51 pm
Microsoft has put the tablet on a slow burn, which to me is a good thing. I find that touch is an experience that gets better as the device gets bigger. Having fondled both an iphone and Surface implementation, the Surface was the experience that was more compelling. Having said all of this, the big win in screen-based input is the good-old digitizer. Seeing as how many touch-enabled devices are on the floor this year at CES that run Windows 7, my guess is that Microsoft is going to be showing off just how many new devices support advanced (i.e. touch) features of its new OS.
But as long as we’re throwing water on rumors, can we hear more about Apple when it actually shows something later this month?