Microsoft’s May 20 Surface event is now a thing of the past with Surface Pro 3 being the highlight of the event, but one thing that Redmond didn’t do during the event was to unveil a Surface Mini – something that analysts, critics and fans were eagerly waiting for.
Some believe that Microsoft killed the tablet altogether; however, there are those who believe that Microsoft hasn’t given up on Surface Mini and it will launch the tablet sooner or later. The decision to drop the Surface Mini from the Surface event was taken at the ‘11th hour’, new reports have claimed.
According to Neowin, the primary reason why Microsoft didn’t go about unveiling the Surface Mini was that the executives over at the company feared that a smaller Surface tablet didn’t have a good enough value proposition that could appeal to users.
The report also claims that Surface Mini isn’t dead, but it has been put on the backburner until Microsoft’s Office team manages to dole out a fully touch-enabled version of Office – sometime in July this year.
It was anticipated that Microsoft will unveil a fully touch-enabled Office at the Surface event and that it could be one of those key features that it will bank on to sell the future versions of all Surface tablets. That didn’t happen and now, as Neowin report claims, there are nearly 20,000 Surface Mini tablets that will just lie there gathering dust.
The report also claims that Stephen Elop, the man in charge of the devices business unit at Microsoft, believes that there were no differentiating factors from other small-sized tablets out there and feared that it may not sell well.
So if reports are to be believed, it won’t be long before we see a Surface Mini loaded with fully touch enabled Office.
