Dual-OS devices are officially dead before their arrival. First ASUS was forced to abandon its plans for the Transformer Book Duet TD300, after Microsoft and Google reportedly pressured the company to axe the device. Now, Huawei is doing the same with its dual-boot smartphone.
Just last week, Huawei Chief Marketing Officer Shao Yang stated that the company was very excited about a new dual-OS smartphone, which would run both Android and Windows Phone. Yang stated that Huawei hoped to release the device very soon and spoke at length about the advantages of dual-boot smartphone.
"With Windows Phone, one direction for us -- and one that we are now following -- is dual OS. Dual OS as in Android and Windows together," Yang said to Trusted Reviews. "If it is Windows only, maybe people will not find it as easy a decision to buy the phone. If they have the Android and Windows together, you can change it as you wish and it is much easier for people to choose Windows Phone."
Now it looks like Huawei's marketing pitch backfired, as the company announced on Wednesday that it would not be releasing the mythical dual-boot smartphone any time soon.
"Huawei Consumer Business Group adopts an open approach towards mobile operating systems to provide a range of choices for consumers," the company said in a statement. "However, most of our products are based on Android OS, [and] at this stage, there are no plans to launch a dual-OS smartphone in the near future."
Huawei also assured Microsoft that it's not throwing Windows under the bus and that it plans to continue producing Windows-based products as long as there is demand for them.
"Microsoft is still a key global partner of Huawei Consumer Business Group," Huawei said. "As long as the consumers continue to demand Windows, we will continue to supply them."
Meanwhile, fans of dual-boot devices mourned the passing of yet another highly-anticipated Android-Windows device. Many Windows users were very excited about the prospect of the dual-boot ASUS laptop hybrid and Huawei smartphone because they believed that these dual-OS devices would be the best of both worlds.
Tech pundits, however, weren't too surprised that Google and Microsoft asserted their influence to stop dual-boot devices. Even though tech makes strange bedfellows, things don't get that strange.
