Speaking at the launch, Windows division president Steven Sinofsky hailed Windows 8 as a major milestone in the evolution of computing, moving Windows from the world of the keyboard and mouse into the era of touch-oriented mobile devices.

“Today, we’re connected all the time. People and communication are the new centre of activities. In creating Windows 8, we shunned the incremental, and instead we have boldly re-imagined Windows for this new era,” he said.

Sinofsky also said that Windows 8 is about “the best PCs ever”, and the firm showed off a number of new laptops and tablets that will ship with the new operating system, including its own Surface tablet.

“Today I am pleased to announce that there are over 1,000 new PCs already certified for Windows 8, including fully capable PCs that will be available for under $300,” Sinofsky said.

At the same time, Sinofsky declared the “grand opening of the Windows Store”, the built-in way to acquire apps designed for Microsoft’s PC operating system, along with the launch of the Windows RT variant that runs on ARM based hardware such as Microsoft’s own Surface tablets.

The company highlights that the latter support all-day battery life and feature built-in versions of Microsoft’s Office 2013 apps.
Windows 8 is available from today, 26 October in a limited number of versions – Windows 8 and Windows 8 Professional – plus a Windows 8 Enterprise version for large organisations.

Samsung’s development boards hint at where the firm will be going in terms of tablet hardware in the future and the Arndale board suggests that the company is looking to pack considerable graphics power into its future designs. The firm released the Arndale development board sporting a dual-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex A15 chip and a quad-core ARM Mali T-604 GPU based on the firm’s 32nm High-K Metal Gate fab process.
Samsung claims that the combination of a dual-core ARM Cortex A15 chip and a quad-core Mali GPU makes the board perfect for high-end tablets where multi-tasking and fast response times are required. The firm also pushed the Mali GPU’s ability to support full profile OpenCL and said that the board ships with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean supporting both 7in and 10.1in touchscreen displays.

TH Kim, VP of System LSI marketing and device service solutions at Samsung said, “Imagination is the only barrier to the next era of mobile applications. The latest community development board powered by the Exynos 5 Dual gives developers access to a complete dual-core Cortex-A15 processor and Mali-T604 GPU platform with features not usually found on other community platforms, including NFC, GPS and a camera sensor. This inexpensive solution paves the way for an entirely new generation of middleware software and applications to be developed in an open source environment.”

The firm, which cannot reveal the methods it uses to collect market data for propriety reasons, claims that while Android tablet sales accounted for 41 percent of the market, shipping 10.2 million units in the third quarter, up from 29 percent a year earlier, Apple’s IOS tablet sales declined to 57 percent from 64 percent in the same quarter last year, and shifted just 14 million Ipads worldwide.

Despite the increase in Android device market share, the report said global tablet shipments grew just 43 percent, from 17.2 million units in the third quarter of 2011 to 24.7 million in the third quarter of 2012. Compared with 289 percent growth in the second quarter of 2011, Strategy Analytics said this growth “was the weakest growth rate since the modern tablet industry began in quarter two 2010″.

Strategy Analytics said that this general slowdown and Android share increase were due to three main reasons: the global economy slowed down so people were buying fewer gadgets, Apple was quiet on the tablet front ahead of its Ipad Mini and forth generation Ipad launch, and Android competition got tougher, with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean becoming more intuitive, user friendly and thus increasing in popularity.

The analyst firm also said that the gap between Apple and individual hardware vendors making Android tablets is still “quite large” but collectively they are slowly muscling in on Apple’s market dominance.

However, speaking with the firm’s executive director, Neil Mawston, we found that the report’s data refers to “sell-in” devices, that is, the number of tablets sold from hardware vendors to retailers and not “sell-through” volume sold from vendors through retailers to customers. For all we know, there could be a stacks and stacks of Android tablets holding up stock room ceilings in high street stores like Currys and PC World that they cannot shift, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that many Android tablets were “sold”.

Regardless, if Strategy Analytics’ report is accurate and Android tablets are in fact shipping to retailers in larger volumes, then this alone tends to show that they are increasingly in demand and are becoming more popular with consumers.