Huawei's rumored dual OS laptop may never see the light of day

Perhaps spurred by its recent good fortune in the smartphone market, Huawei is being rumored to be interested in entering the PC space, particularly laptops. But it won't settle for any old school laptop, of course. Those rumors make mention of a hybrid laptop, a.k.a 2-in-1 tablets, as well as of dual booting Windows 10 and Android. The idea is definitely nothing new and we've heard the story, even the promise, a long, long time ago. And chances are, just like those old stories, Huawei's tale might meet the same tragic end.

The desire to have both Windows and Android running side by side has existed for quite some time now, with a compromise of running an Android emulator inside of Windows. But it was probably ASUS, whose Transformer Book Trio appears above, and Samsung who were the first big names to put out the idea of dual booting the two operating systems on the same device and on equal footing. None, except one or two, of those products ever made it to the market.

The official reasons have never been revealed, but the rumors wee persistent. Either Microsoft or both Microsoft and Google didn't want their OS to share the same bed. It's not difficult to see how the two tech giants would have been able to impose their will through licensing. ASUS has tried again and again to get around that, and the only one that almost worked was a detachable 2-in-1 with Android running separately on the tablet side and Windows on the keyboard half.

At this point, it isn't known how Huawei will get around that problem. Presumnig, of course, that it's true anyway. Huawei releasing a dual boot device that dances with both Android and Windows has also appeared in smartphone form as early as 2014. And so far none have been realized.

Granted, there are quite a few small Chinese OEMs putting out Windows/Android hybrids of all shapes and sizes, but those are small fry compared to Huawei. Unless Microsoft and/or Google had a change of heart, it's unlikely Huawei will fare better than ASUS or Samsung.

SOURCE: Weibo

VIA: GizmoChina