We have only just finished playing with the Samsung Series 7 Slate which features the touch unfriendly Windows 7, but it seems as if the South Korean manufacturer is already getting ready to launch a Windows 8 Slate in 2012.According to a report in Bloomberg, Samsung will bring a Series 7 tablet with Windows 8 to market in the second half of 2012. Only a couple of months ago, we saw Microsoft show off Windows 8 running on a Samsung tablet and even gave away a whole load of them to developers.
The tablets given to the developers at the BUILD conference were slightly different to the Series 7 Slate 700T we reviewed, as they had 3G and USB 3.0 included.
The Windows 8 tablet is likely to be a modified version of this tablet according to Uhm Kyu Ho, head of sales and marketing at Samsung’s personal-computer business.
Samsung also confirmed that the Series 7 tablet is aimed at business users, though with the £1,000 price tag, we could have guessed that for ourselves.
Owners of the current Windows 7 Slate will get an upgrade to the much more touch-friendly Windows 8, though Samsung declined to say when this would happen.
Indeed Samsung doesn’t even include the Slate as part of its tablet sales, along with the likes of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, preferring to group it with laptop sales. The South Korean company is hoping to boost laptop sales by 80 per cent to 18 million units globally this year.
While we certainly liked a lot of what the Series 7 Slate 700T had to offer, the fact that Windows 7 just doesn’t work on a touchscreen device was always going to be a problem. Will the addition of Windows 8 make it a winner? Let us know what you think in the comments.