Dell discontinues the XPS 10 tablet

Dell has apparently discontinued the XPS 10 Windows RT tablet. That’s not surprising — it’s been almost a year since the company first introduced the tablet, and these things don’t tend to have very long product life cycles.

But it’s not clear that Dell has any plans to introduce a new Windows RT tablet. Instead if you go to the XPS 10 product page, you’re directed to the Dell Latitude 10 as a “comparable system.” That’s a 10 inch tablet with an Intel Atom processor and Windows 8 software.

Dell is holding an event to launch new devices on October 2nd, but the only tablet the company has promised so far is an 8 inch Windows 8.1 tablet called the Dell Venue.

Windows RT looks just like Windows 8, but it’s designed to run on devices with ARM-based processors. Microsoft also restricts third party apps so that most users will only be able to grab them from the Windows Store — and for the most part, those apps will only run in the full-screen, Modern or Metro-style user interface, not traditional desktop mode.

More importantly, you can’t run thousands of apps designed for earlier versions of Windows on a Windows RT device because not only are they absent from the Windows Store, they’re not compiled to run on ARM processors.