Patent troll pretending to be a practising entity

Summary: Patent shakedown and racketeering giant Microsoft claims to be working on its own tablet, but it's looking like a farce

"The hyped tablet with Vista8 does not ship yet," wrote a contributor of ours, "it's also likely to have dreadful battery life. Also, ARM is probably going to have locked bootloaders preventing the installation of a useful OS like Android."

Yes, the patent racketeers from Redmond claim to actually have products even though they don't. In this particular area of rapid growth, they just don't have hardware products after Zune, SideKick, KIN etc. died a shameful death.

Here is a reminder of how Microsoft is planning to restrict these devices such that they only run Vista 8 (so much for UEFI [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] for 'security').

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ridicules this vapourware, naming "Vista 8" as a joke as well (our meme is spreading):

Here’s the best part of Microsoft’s lame attempt to surprise us with a significant announcement:

Windows Embedded, Drone Edition IPad for Xbox Clippy for Metro Minesweeper 2013 Windows Vista 8 Metro Edition Microsoft Works for Blackberry 10 Vista, Second Edition

Those are among the names that the bored tech press came up with for Microsoft’s new product on Twitter while we were waiting for Microsoft to get its act together and make its announcement.

When Microsoft has real products -- not just vapourware -- they will fail just like Microsoft's other hardware products, Surface included. ⬆