HTC’s love/hate affair with tablet devices goes on. Rumours surfaced back in January that HTC had halted plans to develop a tablet device. But in April, new rumours emerged to contradict those. But recent comments from Eric Lin, the company’s global PR and online community manager, appear to have clarified the situation. Speaking to Pocket-lint.com, he said:
“We are always looking at it, but, right now, the whole idea is that in order to be successful with a tablet, you need to have something compelling. And not just a compelling form factor. You need to find that compelling use, that compelling story, that one compelling feature. And we are not going to do anything until we have found that.”
“You’ve seen how, at Computex, there were 80 different Android tablets,” he continued. “So if we just release an Android tablet, then we’re one of 81… Whereas, if we have a compelling feature, a really compelling use, anything like that, then it’ll help us to stand out. It’s going to take a lot of work searching for that.”
While HTC is looking at successors to past UMPC and tablet devices such as the HTC Advantage and HTC Shift (which met with limited success), it does appear that we will have to wait a while longer to see them hit the street.