“People familiar with Microsoft’s plans” have told the New York Times that Microsoft will be unveiling a new line of slates at CES in January. Well, yeah. But beyond that, these mysterious tipsters seem to think that Ballmer might even give us a taste of Windows 8. I’d believe it if I thought Microsoft could move that fast, but I just don’t see it happening.
It seems to me that Windows 8, likely much more touch-friendly and web-integrative, must still be quite a ways off (end of 2011 is what we’ve heard), and in order to demo it, they’d have to have it at least visually complete and in a form that could be squeezed onto one of their partners’ new tablets. It’d be cool if true, but… nah.
The tipster seems to confirm the Samsung Gloria tablet we saw the other day, and it goes further, saying that, like Dell’s recent convertible netbook/tablet, it’ll have a tablet-specific UI layer running only when the device is in tablet mode. Hopefully they do better than Dell did.