Microsoft VP Tami Reller told the Financial Times that “key aspects of the software will be changed when Microsoft updates the OS this year.  She referred to “difficulties” many users have had with the software. “The learning curve is definitely real,” she told the FT.

The story set off a flurry of comments and speculation as to what the changes will be and comparisons to Coca-Cola’s “New Coke-Classic Coke” fiasco.

As GigaOM’s Tom Krazit wrote in February, Windows 8 was one of the company’s most important launches in years — it represented a huge attempt by the company to make its OS relevant on tablets where Apple’s iPad was eating Microsoft’s lunch.  That move was represented by its “radically overhauled Metro user interface”  borrowed from the latest Windows Phone. It’s a touch friendly look and feel that was, and still is, alien to many Windows desktop users.

A huge re-do now will no doubt turn up the heat on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who has been the subject of considerable negative press over the past few years. But it’s really unclear just what changes will be made. Many folks will immediately assume that Microsoft will nuke the Metro interface in favor of classic windows to get the installed base over the hump. Far more likely is it will offer a choice of interfaces.

Here’s the thing: When it comes to radical change that consumers may demand, Microsoft is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. The cool Metro interface won good reviews on the smart phone but was seen as way too much of a change for Windows-savvy workers who’ve been on the platform for ten or 20 years.

For that huge installed base, change is not a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft navigates this tricky course. For it’s part, Microsoft suggests that Windows 8 sales aren’t hurting. On Tuesday, Reller noted on the Windows blog that 100 million licenses have been sold, which is on par with the copmany’s prior Windows 7 launch.

Update: A Microsoft spokeswoman contacted for comment responded via email:  “It is unfortunate that the Financial Times did not accurately represent the content or the context of our conversation about the good response to date on Windows 8 and the positive opportunities ahead on both Windows 8 and Windows Blue.” And she referred to the aforementioned blog.

This story was updated at 11:32 a.m. PDT with Microsoft comment.

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What’s the secret sauce in the silicon? The chips will use a 22 nanometer process combined with Intel’s Tri-Gate transistors. The Tri-Gate technology is already used in Intel chips for laptops and desktops, but Silvermont will be the first to use it in mobile devices such as tablets.

AnandTech has a superbly detailed analysis of the new chip, which, according to Intel’s official press release, offers these benefits:

• A new out-of-order execution engine enables best-in-class, single-threaded performance.
  
• A new multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.
• New IA instructions and technologies bringing enhanced performance, virtualization and security management capabilities to support a wide range of products. These instructions build on Intel’s existing support for 64-bit and the breadth of the IA software installed base.
• Enhanced power management capabilities including a new intelligent burst technology, low-power C states and a wider dynamic range of operation taking advantage of Intel’s 3-D transistors. Intel Burst Technology 2.0 support for single- and multi-core offers great responsiveness scaled for power efficiency.

I expect we’ll first see Silvermont power a new generation of Windows 8 tablets around the holidays. The current Intel Atom slates running Windows 8 offer the same benefits and experiences of a similarly priced Windows RT slate with an ARM chip. The added benefit is that the tablets with Intel inside run the full Windows 8 software and provide a complete Desktop mode experience.

The downside is that the chips aren’t powerful enough to provided a superb Windows 8 experience; for that, buyers opt for Intel Core i5 chips and give up battery life in the process. If Intel’s claims of Silvermont are correct, however, a low-priced Windows 8 tablet of the future could offer a big performance boost when needed or provide battery savings if a user prefers it.

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Now Shuttleworth, who used tens of millions of his own dollars to fund Canonical and made it his ambition to entrench Ubuntu Linux on desktops and servers is now launching a full-on assault to put it on your smartphone, your tablet and the computers that run your favorite cloud services via OpenStack.

Taking on the giants

It’s a gutsy bet. He’s basically taking on Google’s Chrome Browser, ChromeOS and Android OS. And then there’s iOS. Not a job for the faint of heart. In a recent interview with GigaOM,  Shuttleworth said a key Ubuntu advantage is that its basic code really does run everywhere from itty-bitty mobile devices to big iron. No Android-Chrome OS divide here.

“The core of Ubuntu that runs on the server is the same as on the phone and that’s a wonderful resonance,” Shuttleworth said. “We’ve done  pioneering work to put server Linux on ARM chips and the core of those ARM chips is the same for servers as it is for smartphones,”  Shuttleworth said.

Admittedly, it’s still early days for running ARM servers in a production environment — my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported that Baidu is doing it — for storage — but few others are. But the need for energy-sipping servers is not going away. And ARM servers address that demand.

As more cloud services get delivered via smartphones and tablets, all that “resonance” could come in handy. But timing may be a problem. Android and Apple iOS, which dominate that smartphone and tablet market now, will be hard to dislodge. If you believe Google Chairman Eric Schmidt — a biased observer — Android Android’s growth rate is, is on track to hit 1 billion downloads within the next 6 to 9 months. And, to further complicate matters, Microsoft seems willing to spend big to build its presence in smartphones and tablets as well. As much money as Shuttleworth has, Microsoft has more.

Seemingly undaunted, Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is getting serious looks from silicon providers, from carriers and from handset makers who are interested in offering it on their devices. He declined to provide names. It is true that Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile assets still worries third-party handset makers who don’t relish the thought of competing with their OS provider, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed Android adoption.

Ubuntu shows strength in cloud

Ubuntu is already a big presence in the cloud by virtue of Amazon Web Services where it is the most popular operating environment on EC2 — at least as measured by the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that people create. “The number of AMIs running Ubuntu is 5 or 6 times as many as Windows or any other operating system,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with Redmonk. One caveat is that people create lots of AMIs that they may not actually use, cautioned The 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks.

And Ubuntu came earlier than many other vendors to the OpenStack party. It’s got a leg up in the enterprise two years ago when  HP named it the lead host and guest OS in HP’s OpenStack cloud. That relationship continues to this day.

Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu’s OpenStack gets tons of interest from telcos and carriers that are rushing to create their own cloud services to better compete with AWS. One theme coming out of the OpenStack Summit last month was that these sleeping giants, many of which offer VMware vCloud Director options that price them out of the market, are finally waking up to the threat that AWS poses to them. And that is something Shuttleworth feels Ubuntu, with Canonical behind it,  can capitalize on.

“We are in a very good position when carriers want to look beyond standing up OpenStack to what the end-user experience is,” he said.

In his view, Ubuntu more than other Linux OpenStack flavors, offers simplicity and power — a claim that other OpenStack players would likely dispute. Linux rivals Red Hat, SUSE and are also all in the mix here. And Nebula’s selling point is its OpenStack controller that makes it easy to plug OpenStack into existing legacy environments. There will be a ton of competition among the OpenStack providers even as they all contend with CloudStack and Eucalyptus options.

Shuttleworth maintains Ubuntu’s advantage, however.

“We really are at the point where you can take a USB with Ubuntu, stick it on 1 to 300 servers and in a short period have a high-availability cloud — compute, storage, and network — up and running that provides a lot of value,” he said. “This is real and it’s helping people get over the conceptual hurdle of moving to cloud. It’s at the point where you can have ten people debating it for a week or you can just go and do it — the cost is low enough and the lessons are valuable enough to make it happen.”

But what about revenue?

There’s one not-so-small hitch here. As many good reviews as Ubuntu Linux has gotten, the revenue or profit picture is about as clear as mud. Canonical’s business model is that customers pay for support and maintenance on free software. But the privately held company won’t say how many people actually pay for any of that. And it doesn’t talk about how much money Shuttleworth has ponied up since founding the company in 2004. The question is whether Canonical (and Ubuntu) could stand on its own without his deep pockets. Face it, it’s hard to take a customer from free to non-free.

When it comes to questions about revenue or profitability, Canonical will only say that customers including PC, phone and tablet manufacturers and big companies that deploy Ubuntu at scale  use Canonical’s paid tools and services to support their server, cloud and client environments.

That may not be enough detail for enterprise buyers who want to know if the vendor they use today will be around next year or the year after. For a company that has such grand plans for a free operating system, Canonical needs to address these questions at some point.

Shuttleworth will be talking about his grand cloud vision at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in London in September, so here’s your chance to ask.

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Apple is still the world’s largest tablet seller; it shipped 19.5 million in the last quarter, up from 11.8 million the same quarter a year ago, according to IDC and its own numbers released earlier this month. That’s an increase of 64 percent. Its No. 1 mobile competitor, Samsung, saw its shipments grow even faster, from 2.3 million tablets a year ago to 8.8 million in the latest quarter. Rounding out the Top 5, Asus and Amazon also more than doubled their tablet shipments from a year ago. Microsoft, which did not start selling tablets until October 2012, shipped 900,000 Surface units between January and March.

The overall growth in tablets means Android is now the most popular mobile OS in tablets shipped during the quarter; a year ago it was on 8 million of tablets shipped worldwide, compared to the 11.8 million iPads. This past quarter saw Android shipped on 27.8 million tablets that were shipped and 19.5 million iPads and iPad minis.

All this does not mean doom and gloom for the iPad. Apple’s tablet sales continue at a rapid clip, increasing every quarter – faster than the iPhone right now. And while its overall share of tablet shipments may be slipping, it’s still selling more than double the number of tablets each quarter as its closest competitor, Samsung (see chart below).

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He told Bloomberg:

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins

Heins’ comments have been mocked mostly for his eye-popping five-year prediction and because of the fresh memories of BlackBerry’s utter flop in the tablet market: the Playbook. But, really, it’s not totally impossible that something much more compelling than tablets may emerge before 2018 that will make iPads or Galaxy tablets unnecessary — that’s just the nature of tech. After all, BlackBerry executives know all too well how quickly an established market can change after watching the iPhone and Android decimate its smartphone  business over the last several years.

But, as a factual, across-the-board statement, the notion that “tablets aren’t a good business model” is problematic. There’s at least one company that might argue with him since it’s been doing pretty well in part thanks to its decision to start making tablets in January 2010. Samsung, for its part, seems pretty happy with its decision to get into that business too. Gartner expects the worldwide tablet business to grow from 197 million units this year to 467 million units by 2017.

You know who’s not having a great time in the tablet market? Companies that were late to the game. Like Motorola. And Dell. Don’t forget HP’s Palm debacle.

And, yes, BlackBerry. The BlackBerry Playbook arrived a year after the iPad, but the software was missing huge, important things, like native email and calendaring. The tablet flopped, and the company wrote off a large amount of unsold devices.

The Bloomberg article reminds us that Heins has previously said he’ll make another Playbook if he can make it profitably. That statement is more in touch with reality: it’s possible that BlackBerry can’t make a tablet that is measurably better than what’s already on the market and do it at a profit. It’s hard to compete with Apple and Samsung at this point, given their strong mobile computing brands and deep supply chains.

Heins seems to be implying that smartphones will be more central to the computing experience, as Matt Rosoff argues here at CITEWorld. That’s certainly plausible, but the idea that BlackBerry will be the one to figure this out is harder to believe.

In any event, Heins’ biggest priority right now is promoting his latest smartphones and the new BlackBerry 10 operating system. The success or failure of those products, as opposed to the future of tablets, will determine if his company is around in five years.

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The SamMobile blog, which has a better than average track record for such leaks, reported on Monday that the Nexus 11 appears on Samsung’s 2013 tablet roadmap. Samsung currently makes the Nexus 10 tablet and it also built the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S smartphones. As the biggest seller of Android hardware, Samsung is Google’s key partner of late. Then again, the two have a complicated relationship as Samsung’s Galaxy line is becoming synonymous with the Android brand to many.

So what does the leaked roadmap say about a new Nexus tablet? Not much but enough to give prospective Nexus 10 buyers a reason to pause: The rumored tablet is expected to be the first octa-core tablet to market, running on Samsung’s 8-core Exynos 5410 chip. Don’t get too hung up on the eight cores though; they’re not all high performing processors. Instead, four are cutting edge Cortex-A15 cores for heavy duty activities while the other quartet are Cortex-A7 cores to offload lighter tasks and save on power consumption.

The 11-inch display is expected to be a Super PLS TFT screen and I’d expect it to be at least 1920 x 1080 resolution, if not the same 2560 x 1600 resolution used on the current Nexus 10. A pair of cameras should grace the slate — 8 megapixels on the back and 2 megapixels on the front — while a feature unique to Nexus devices may finally appear as well: micro SD expansion.

A lesser version of the tablet is reportedly planned as well: Samsung may create a Galaxy Tab 11 with similar specifications. That device would certainly use Samsung’s TouchWiz software interface and feature set, of course. And if the roadmap is accurate, Samsung will opt for a standard dual-core Exynos 5250 chip; likely to keep costs down.

Could the Nexus 11 be legit? I’d say the odds are quite good although I don’t know if we need a larger Android tablet on the market. Then again, might a Chrome OS tablet be a possibility? If so, then an 11- inch slate might be sized just right, especially with a docking keyboard.

We’ll find out for sure at Google I/O, where we’ll be reporting live.

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The new tool allows developers to see how their app “is doing against basic guidelines for tablet app distribution and quality.” That means upon uploading a new or updated version of an Android app, developers will get instant feedback on how well their software is optimized for Android tablets.

If a developer didn’t target the right screen sizes or Android version for tablets, for example, they’ll get a reminder to do so. After addressing the un-optimized app components, devs can then upload a version better suited for larger-screen Android devices.

So why the big push? I can think of two reasons: one that’s been around for a while and one that’s fairly recent.

Android tablets essentially began life as super-sized smartphones, meaning apps weren’t optimally sized for bigger screens. This was a valid early criticism of Android tablets that I witnessed firsthand in 2010 when I bought a 7-inch Galaxy Tab. I often found very large buttons in apps or text that didn’t fit properly in a section of an app.

Unlike Apple’s approach — which offers apps specific both phones and tablets (save for the universal apps) — Google doesn’t support have tablet-specific apps. Instead, the company created guidelines and coding tools for apps to work properly on both phones and tablets with a single .apk installation file. But developers have to take advantage of these and properly code for different screen sizes. Not all of them do; in fact, I’d say a fair amount actually don’t. Hence, Google is trying to subtly nudge developers to do so with the new optimization tips tool.

Another reason came about just this week: According to one analyst report, Android tablet sales may be finally starting to catch up with iPad sales. Strategy Analytics shared its data on Thursday and it shows that Android tablet market share around the world is 43.1 percent, compared to the iPad at 48.2 percent. Note that the Android figures are for shipments, so that figure is surely inflated due to Android tablet inventory sitting on shelves or in warehouses.

With a rise of shipments, even, Android developers should be considering the mobile app experience on tablets and Google is all too willing to help in that department. It has been trying to do so for the better part of two years — Android 3.0 added many tablet optimized features — but every little bit moving forward helps.

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Since Google pulled the release, I haven’t been able to install the software on my Chromebook Pixel for testing but I will as soon as I can to verify the function. Still, the wording seems pretty clear: the notes say you can “rotate the screen on all Chromebooks” with this software update.

I can’t really think of a reason I’d want to rotate the screen on my Pixel — or any of the other Chromebooks currently available — so I’m thinking either a Chrome OS tablet or a Chromebook with rotating touchscreen is the works. Perhaps we’ll hear more at Google I/O next month?

Although this might be a stretch on my part, I see another sign of new form factors or Chrome OS tablets. The updated Chrome OS build adds a “New Immersive browsing mode – browse the web with only 4px of Chrome.” While this will be handy on any Chromebook, it can help maximize the screen space of a smaller tablet. However, I may be reading into that function too much.

Still, I could see Google pushing the envelope when it comes to Chrome OS hardware. Heck, it just did that with the Chromebook Pixel, bringing a premium Chrome OS experience at a premium price. How could Google continue down this path? A Chrome OS tablet with docking keyboard, similar to Microsoft’s Surface hardware would be my best guess.

That design would bring the desktop browser experience to a more mobile device while still allowing users to work on a laptop-like computer with a dock or keyboard attachment. The touchscreen feature originally pioneered on the Pixel would come in handy for such a device although Chrome OS would need an on-screen keyboard. Guess what? A peek at the Chromium source code from two weeks ago shows that Google is working on just that: A software-based touch keyboard for Chrome OS.

Interestingly, past Chrome tablet rumors have turned out be to that: Simply rumors. In fact, Google’s vice president of engineering Linus Upson told TechRadar in May of 2012 “We are not working on a Chrome OS tablet.” But that was then and this is now. We’ve already seen a major shakeup at Google when Sundar Pichai, SVP of Google Chrome and Apps, took over Android from Andy Rubin last month. Perhaps this is all related to a new direction for Chrome OS?

It’s worth noting also in the new Chrome OS software are the improvements to the Files app that we discussed on our GigaOM Chrome Show podcast this morning. Users of Chromebooks and Chromeboxes can expect to see file options for recently viewed files, shared files and files that are marked for offline use.

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Unlike Intel at the other end of silicon spectrum, ARM doesn’t build or fabricate chips. Instead, it designs the chip architecture and receives license and royalty fees from companies that use the designs. Apple’s A-line processors, Samsung’s Exynos and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, for example, are all based on ARM designs. Essentially, every new smartphone or tablet — with a few rare exceptions — runs on a ARM-based chip.

As a result of high demand for mobile computers, the shipment of ARM chips is up 35 percent from a year ago. That figure shows a sharp contrast with higher-performance desktop and laptop computers: smartphone sales passed those of the PC sales in 2011 and I’m on record suggesting that tablet sales will do the same later this year. Is it any wonder that some are dubious about Intel’s future in the mobile market, given that ARM-based chips have it wrapped it up for now?

Intel is making some progress with its Atom chips but ARM continues to dominate and grow the mobile segment. The company now has 973 revenue-generating licensees, with 22 of them signed this past quarter. If the market for wearable gadgets takes off — as I suspect it will, although it’s really just getting started — ARM seems poised to continue powering most mobiles for some time yet.

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Research into optimal keyboard layouts is as old as QWERTY itself, a legacy inherited from 19th century typewriters. Thumb typing with QWERTY is notoriously inefficient on touchscreen tablets and phones. Starting from the basics — how a touchscreen device is held in one’s hands — an international team of researchers drew on user behavioral data and computational models to develop the new layout. The lead investigator, Antti Oulasvirta of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, will officially unveil this research at CHI2013 on May 1.

Theoretically, the model predicts that users should be able to reach 49 words per minute with KALQ, and because the study’s subjects were non-native English speakers, typing speed could conceivably be even better in natives. KALQ was designed so the most commonly used letters are clustered, which means the travel distances are short and both hands work roughly equally and alternately. Most of the vowels are positioned near the space bar and are handled by the right thumb, while the left thumb takes care of most of the consonants and most of the first letters of words. For lefties, the orientation can be reversed, and the key size can even be scaled for different hand sizes.

For KALQ to work, tablets should ideally be gripped horizontally, with the corners cradled in the valley at the base of the thumbs. On a 7-inch tablet (the researchers used the Samsung Galaxy Tab), test subjects had the fastest movements times and best thumb mobility with this configuration, though the grip gave them access to less tablet surface area overall.

Based on this tablet gripping strategy, the researchers used computational techniques to determine the optimal key assignments. Their model of thumb movements was trained on millions of English-language tweets that originated from mobile devices. The end result, KALQ, minimizes movement times, and worked even better when users were trained to move their thumbs simultaneously and anticipate moves by hovering the thumb over the next letter.

Novice tablet users reached typing speeds that eclipsed those achievable with QWERTY after about 10 hours of training, and continued to improve, reaching 37 words per minute. This is the fastest thumb typing speed ever reported, according to Oulasvirta and colleagues, and is 19 percent faster than typing speeds found in previous studies. The end result represents a 34 percent improvement over baseline QWERTY performance in this study’s subjects.

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