The latest rumour to do the rounds surrounding Nokia’s will-they-won’t-they tablet? We’ll see it in the last quarter of the year, but Nokia’s playing it extremely cautious when it comes to production numbers, meaning it’ll either take no risks on WOA tablets, or sell out in seconds.
The Next Web is our source for this particular bit of scuttlebutt, which suggests that Nokia’s first WOA tablet will be something of a limited edition. Nokia’s allegedly looking into producing only 200,000 Nokia Windows 8 Tablets in its first production run.
200,000 tablet is probably a lot if you stacked them all up together, but in terms of the larger tablet market, it’s a very small gamble indeed. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads in the last quarter, and it’s still clearly the target to hit; 200,000 represents a very small dart indeed.
I can see the business logic in a small order, to an extent. HP got badly burnt on the TouchPad (although that was arguably also a loss of nerve on HP’s part) and had to dump excess stock; if a Nokia tablet failed to sell, there’s not too much of a hit on Nokia’s bottom line. Conversely, though, if consumers flock to WOA, Nokia could be left with no stock to sell.
[The Next Web]