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This isn’t a huge shock, given that ASUS has already publicly expressed woes about poor sales of its Windows RT products, but CEO Jerry Shen‘s latest comments have a surprising edge of finality to them. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he repeated that “Windows RT has not been very successful” and said that the company took a writedown on its stock of RT tablets, although he didn’t reveal the size of the loss. He also said that, from now on, ASUS will solely make Windows 8 devices that run on Intel / x86 processors, due to the backwards compatibility with Windows software offered by those products. Meanwhile, NVIDIA has also predicted losses due to its involvement with RT, but it seems to be pushing ahead with a next-gen ARM-based Surface tablet regardless.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, ASUS

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Via: TNW

Source: WSJ

For those of you out there who happened to own a Surface RT tablet and have already installed the preview version of Windows 8.1, then you might be one of those who have been affected by some bugs. Apparently, one niggling issue involves a rather serious battery drain on the tablet, and a rather unorthodox workaround has been solved by the folks over at Microsoft.

A thread at the Microsoft Support forums claimed that a Surface RT owner happened to be experiencing a battery drain at a rate of between 2% to 3% in just an hour when it is in Connected Standby mode with the preview version of Windows 8.1 installed. He decided to post that a driver which is known as Microsoft UART V2 Driver (\_SB.UAR3), as that seemed to be the main culprit where draining the battery is concerned as he used the Powercfg /sleepstudy command.

A Microsoft support member responded that the solution was to turn on the Bluetooth’s connection on – which does sound rather counterproductive at first, since wouldn’t that use more battery power? Apparently, the affected user must have been at his wits’ end to give it a go, and voila! The battery drain issue was fixed. An explanation by the Microsoft support team member can be found after the jump.

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Windows RT 8.1 Battery Drain Issue Fixed By Turning On Bluetooth original content from Ubergizmo.

While ASUS has been pretty successful in the past with their Android tablet offerings, like the Transformer Pad, and with them helping Google make their Nexus 7 tablets, we guess they were hoping to replicate that success with Windows. Unfortunately it seems that ASUS is not as pleased with the Windows RT operating system and the company’s chairman, Jonney Shih, was quoted as saying that the Windows RT scene is “not very promising”. This does not mean that ASUS will be pulling out of the Windows tablet market, but instead ASUS will be focusing their efforts on creating devices that will be powered by Intel’s chips, and presumably running Windows 8 instead of Windows RT, which is powered by ARM-based processors. The reason behind this is apps, because Shih believes that people still rely a lot on classic Windows apps which might not be available for the RT platform.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | ASUS Does Not Find Windows RT To Be “Very Promising” original content from Ubergizmo.

Microsoft made $853m in revenue from Surface tablets in its 2013 fiscal year, a disappointing figure that failed to even cover the company’s $900m inventory adjustment charge for the poorly selling Surface RT. The figures, confirmed in Microsoft’s most recent 10K filing, paint an underwhelming picture of the Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, though doesn’t specify exactly how many units have been sold.

Microsoft has been coy on giving those figures out, though that hasn’t stopped industry observers from guesstimating around the company’s sales. In March, sources with unofficial access to the numbers claimed that Microsoft had sold around 1.5m units.

Earlier this month, Microsoft admitted it had taken a $900m hit on inventory adjustment around the Surface RT. The news came just a day after Microsoft slashed the price of the tablet by around $150.

Overall, Microsoft still managed to pull together a rise in Windows revenue for the year, though pushing Surface didn’t help. Sales of the tablets failed to even cover the extra $898m the company spent on marketing them and Windows 8, the 10K reveals.

Next up, so the rumor mill would have it, is a new range of second-gen Surface tablets, still running either Windows RT or Windows 8, with a broader choice of processors. There have also been whispers of LTE-equipped versions, to better take on Apple’s 4G-enabled iPads, along with 7-inch versions to challenge the Nexus 7 and iPad mini.

VIA Dina Bass

Surface tablet revenue just $853m Microsoft reveals is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Lenovo has apparently discontinued its only Windows RT notebook, the IdeaPad Yoga 11 convertible, quietly ceasing sales through its own online store. The Yoga 11, which ran the pared-back Windows RT on NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset, has seemingly been superseded by the newer Yoga 11S, which swaps out the ARM chipset and replaces it with an Intel Core i3 processor and a full copy of Windows 8.

The end result is a far more flexible machine. In our original Yoga 11 review, we praised the unusual form-factor but were forced to conclude that Windows RT – and its limitations on software – meant that it wasn’t an all-round work and play machine.

In contrast, as we found when we reviewed the Yoga 11S recently, the presence of Windows 8 makes a big difference for usability. Even though the notebook may be part of Lenovo’s more consumer-centric IdeaPad range, rather than a ThinkPad, it’s still capable of standing up to business use.

Lenovo is yet to comment on the Windows RT version, though if it has indeed been discontinued as the online store suggests, the company wouldn’t be alone in its disappointment with the OS. Dell admitted back in June that sales of its Windows RT tablets had been disappointing, and Microsoft itself recently slashed pricing of its Surface RT worldwide to try to drive demand.

Acer, meanwhile, has described the OS as “not influential” and has no plans for a machine that will run it, and there’s chatter of Microsoft cutting its licensing fees for OEMs too. An incoming update of the Surface RT will supposedly use Windows RT 8.1 and include faster chips and the option of embedded LTE.

We’ve contacted Lenovo for more information, and will update if and when the company gets back to us.

VIA Neowin

Lenovo Yoga 11 Windows RT seemingly axed as official store stops sales is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.