Stefan Mileschin

Tinbox shifter Michael Dell will no longer be shifting anything with an Android label on it.

Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke told the Dell World Conference in Austin the company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. While we did not know that Dell was shipping many Android phones, the fact that the operating system will not see the light of day on any of its tablets is a little odd.

The truth of the matter is that punters were not really interested in Dell's crack at selling mobile devices.

Clarke told Maximum PC that Android was only any good if you had content to peddle to make up the numbers.

Amazon is selling books and Google is making it up with search, but Dell could not find a way to build a business on Android, Clarke said.

Of course if you are trying to run it with underpowered and dull hardware on it customers will not be interested either. Samsung, which has made a killing with Android, has not had many problems. We would have thought that turning out Android based tablets packed with business software for the corporate market would make Dell a pretty penny.

This appears to be the cunning plan. Only, according to Clarke, Dell does not want to use Android to do it.

He said that it was better to focus on Windows 8 for the enterprise market. Clarke touted the Dell XPS 12 hybrid as an example of what the company has in mind.

Ignoring the consumer market is risky given that everyone wants a share of it, but Dell can't compete in it anyway so it is better to focus on what it can do well.

http://news.techeye.net/business/dell-abandons-android