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Huawei Technologies reportedly is backing away from plans to launch a smartphone that can run both Windows Phone and Android, refuting statements made by an executive earlier this month.
Huawei Chief Marketing Officer Shao Yang told news site Trusted Reviews in a March 13 report that the tech vendor in the second quarter would release a smartphone that could be switched between either operating system as a way of helping buyers embrace Microsoft’s OS and of expanding the reach of Huawei’s mobile ambitions.
“If it is Windows [Phone] only, maybe people will not find it as easy a decision to buy the phone,” Yang told the site. “If they have the Android and Windows [Phone] together, you can change it as you wish and it is much easier for people to choose Windows Phone.”
However, company officials are now saying that their intentions have changed between the time Yang spoke with Trusted Reviews and now. In a statement to FierceWireless, Huawei executives said they intend to continue working with both Google and Microsoft, but that there would be no dual-OS device any time soon.
“Huawei Consumer Business Group adopts an open approach toward mobile operating systems to provide a range of choices for consumers,” the company said in the 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.”
They did not say why their plans had changed.
The officials said the company would release new Windows-based smartphones this year, and that “as long as the consumers continue to demand Windows, we will continue to supply them.”
Huawei’s statement comes less than a week after The Wall Street Journal reported that pressure from both Microsoft and Google convinced Asus to shelve plans to launch a two-in-one device that would run both Windows 8.1 and Android.
Asus had showed off its Transformer Book Duet TD300 at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in January, and Intel CEO Brian Krzanich held the system during his keynote at the show as he spoke about the chip maker’s efforts to enable such capabilities through its system-on-a-chip (SoC) products, which also support both Windows and Android. When the two-in-one system was being used as a laptop, it would run Windows. When it was used as a tablet, the system would switch to Android.
The Asus system was expected to hit the market in the first half of this year.
The Wall Street Journal reported that neither Google nor Microsoft liked the idea of the Transformer Book Duet TD300 sharing the operating systems. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the talks between the companies, the news site said Google was only interested in devices that only ran Android, and Microsoft felt the same about Windows. Asus already sells two all-in-one PCs—the Transformer AiO P1801 and P1802—that can run both Windows and Android, though those systems may be taken off the market due to the objections of Microsoft and Google, according to the newspaper.