Smaller Windows 8 tablets planned by Microsoft

Microsoft’s claim for Windows 8’s superiority is that it scales to all manner of screen resolutions and sizes. The company’s CFO, Peter Klein, admitted in a recent interview with SeekingAlpha that the company is planning “small touch devices powered by Windows.”

Microsoft Surface RT tablet

Speaking to SeekingAlpha in a conference call on Thursday 18th last week, Klein had this to say about the company’s recent efforts with making smaller tablets:

“Over the last couple of months, we’ve started seeing devices that take full advantage of Windows 8, and we expect to see more devices across more attractive price points over the coming months. As part of this, we are also working closely with OEMs on a new suite of small touch devices powered by Windows. These devices will have competitive price points, partly enabled by our latest OEM offerings designed specifically for these smaller devices, and will be available in the coming months.”

Klein’s direction in the interview steers intentionally away from the size of the actual devices. Windows 8 currently doesn’t support resolutions lower than 1366 x 768 pixels because lower resolutions don’t leave enough space for the Modern UI snap feature to work (in Modern UI, or Metro, you can snap a full-size app on top of another, with the second app taking up one-fifth of the available display area).

With Windows 8.1, codenamed “Blue”, the snap feature is enhanced and supports splitting Modern UI apps to each take up half the display area, simultaneously also suiting its use on smaller resolutions and screens.

The vague timeline also points to a release in or around July 2013. It would be good to see Intel’s Haswell make it into tablets that are physically smaller, but their Atom processor family designed for tablets, Bay Trail, will only be launching closer to November 2013. “Powered by Windows” could also mean that we’ll see an array of Windows 8 tables powered by ARM processors and some stiff competition from AMD as well.