Dell drops its remaining Android tablets – 6 months after dropping HP
The weak sustainability of low-end market share has claimed a new victim. Dell has dropped its remaining Venue-branded Android tablet line and will instead focus on selling conventional PCs and hybrid “2-in-1” devices running Windows, citing over-saturation and declining demand for slate-style tablets.
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According to a report by Agam Shah for PC World, Dell previously discontinued most of its Android offerings “some time ago” (including Venue-branded smartphones, which were dropped in 2012) but continued to build Venue tablets and an “Android-based Wyse Cloud Connect, a thumb-size computer that can turn a display.”
Those remaining Android product have have now also been abandoned, and Dell will no longer be issuing any new Android updates for them.
“For customers who own Android-based Venue products, Dell will continue to support currently active warranty and service contracts until they expire, but we will not be pushing out future OS upgrades,” the report cited a Dell spokesman as saying.
Dell’s Android tablets were some of the company’s cheapest products, and many were bundled for free with PC laptops. That turned out to be a poor strategy for maintaining sustainable profitability, despite the fact that IDC, Gartner, Strategy Analytics and other market research groups have been hailing Android’s shipment volumes as meaningful for years, abetted by media sources that repeat their numbers without criticism.
To read the rest of the AppleInsider.com report, click here.