Courier dead but other Windows tablets keep coming
Although Microsoft has decided against taking its Courier tablet to market, there are plenty of Windows-based challengers to the iPad on the way. Two more have been announced this week from the Far East.
The first comes from MSI, a Taiwan based firm which specializes in motherboards and graphics card but has previously released several netbooks and PCs. Reports have it that the company will be demonstrating two tablets at Computex, a Taiwan trade fair in the first week of June. One will use the Intel Atom processor that is popular in netbooks, and run Windows 7. The other will run Android and use the nVidia Tegra2 chip.
Other details are still fairly scarce, but the phrase “extremely aggressive” has been bandied about in reference to the pricing. Of course, there are at least three levels which any price would be compared to: the $500 of the cheapest iPad, the $250-300 range which is the starting point for most netbooks, and the $199 point which is often spoken of as a psychological barrier below which electronic devices can appeal to the mass market, sometime even through impulse buys.
For those disappointed by the non-appearance of the Courier. MSI is also working on a dual screen tablet, with the lower screen being able to act as a virtual keyboard. However, it appears this may take some time to appear as the company is still trying to figure out how to get a decent battery life given the demands of running two screens.
Meanwhile Chinese firm Great Wall is working on two tablets, the 7 inch GPAD and the 11-inch GBook. The former runs Windows CE (the ultra-slimline version of Windows designed for embedding in devices) which the latter runs Windows 7.
The GBook looks to have some hefty specs for a tablet device: it offers 2GB of RAM (compared with 256MB in the iPad) and even has a bay for a 2.5-inch hard drive of the type you’d find in a notebook computer.
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