Stefan Mileschin

According to the latest Cebit grapevine, courtesy of German tech news site Heise.de, Samsung will stop selling Windows RT based ATIV tablets in Germany and a few other countries.

Although there is still no official word from Samsung, the move shouldn't surprise anyone. Samsung decided not to sell the ATIV Tab in the US market, as it was deemed that it didn't stand much of a chance against Apple and Android tablets. However, what's not good enough for US consumers usually isn't good enough for their European counterparts.

We checked one of the leading European price search engines for ATIV Tab listings and found dozens of them, from Poland through Germany to Blighty. However, although it is available, we are not convinced that it is finding too many takers. Most German and Austrian retailers sell it for about €600, while prices in some parts of Europe are well north of €700. In Britain, the ATIV Teb sells for £499, after a £50 discount.

The ATIV Tab is not a bad piece of kit. In fact, it has some rather good professional and consumer reviews behind it, but it is overpriced and it costs almost as much as entry level SKUs of Samsung's ATIV Smart PC, which has an Atom CPU and runs Windows 8.

The rumours don't bode well for Microsoft's fledgling tablet OS.

At the moment, only three Windows RT tablets are available in Europe: Redmond's Surface RT, the Asus VivoTab RT TF600, Dell's XPS 10 and the ill fated ATIV Tab from Samsung. Most of them retail in the €550 to €700 range, which means they cost about the same as an iPad 4 and much more than high-end Android tablets.

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