Dell sees room to challenge Apple in tablets

(Reuters) - A growing dissatisfaction among office workers with the clunky computers their employers force them to use, in contrast to the sleek Apple devices many have at home, could yet benefit incumbent suppliers like Dell, a top Dell executive said.

As Apple's third-generation iPad went on sale on Friday, accompanied by the now traditional scenes of fans queuing round the block , Dell's chief commercial officer Steve Felice said the tablet market was still wide open.

Dell ditched its previous attempt at cracking the global tablet market, the Streak, last year. It was based on Google's Android operating system software.

Now Dell is planning a fresh assault with the advent of Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating platform, which is expected later this year and will have a touch interface that works across desktop computers, tablets and smartphones.

"We're very encouraged by the touch capability we are seeing in the beta versions of Windows 8," Felice told Reuters in an interview in London, adding that Dell may also make Android tablets again.

"We have a roadmap for tablets that we haven't announced yet. You'll see some announcements.. for the back half of the year," he said. "We don't think that this market is closed off in any way."

Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and possibly Nokia are also planning Windows 8 tablets.

Felice said that Dell's relationships with its thousands of business customers gave it an advantage over Apple, whose gadgets can cause headaches for IT departments because they operate on different systems.