Dell touts touch in Windows 8, says the tablet market is wide open

In an interview with Reuters, Dell executive Steve Felice says that the company has “a roadmap for tablets that we haven’t announced yet,” and that “we don’t think that this market is closed off in any way.” Dell has already intimated plans to release Windows 8 tablets later this year, including a new enterprise tablet on the day the new Microsoft OS releases. Felice says that “we are very encouraged by the touch capability we are seeing in the beta version of Windows 8,” and that Android also still a potential option for future tablets.

Felice also echoes Dell’s new company line: that it’s now an enterprise company focused on IT solutions rather than a PC company. Dell’s enterprise chief recently said that “it’s no longer about shiny boxes, it’s about IT solutions,” and Felice seems to agree, using an enterprise angle to attack Apple’s offerings — he says that “on the commercial side there are a lot of concerns about security, interoperability, systems and device management, and I think Dell is in the best position to meet those.” We’ll have to wait and see whether the company’s strategy of “[coming] at the market in a different way” will match Dell’s optimism with results in the tablet market later this year.