Wireless

Three views of the Dell Mini 3

(Credit: Dell)

Dell said Friday that it's ready to enter the smartphone business with the Android-based Mini 3.

Long rumored to have a smartphone in the works, Dell said that the first two carriers to sell the Mini 3 will be China Mobile and Brazil's Claro.

In China, the Mini 3 will use OPhone, China Mobile's customized version of Google's Android operating system. "We are excited for Dell to be among the first manufacturers to introduce new technology based on the OPhone platform," an unnamed China Mobile representative said in Dell's press release.

Dell would not offer any specifics about the software on the Brazilian phone, saying simply that "the initial Mini 3 smartphones are designed around the Android platform."

The company also did not provide technical specifications or pricing information for the phone, saying those would be revealed when the devices arrive in stores--probably late November for China Mobile and by year's end for Claro. It also did not say when the phone would arrive in the U.S. or other markets.

Dell did confirm that the Mini 3 has a 3.5-inch high-definition touch screen, a detail that Michael Tatelman, a Dell sales and marketing executive, had earlier told the Associated Press. The Mini 3 sold in China won't have Wi-Fi at the start, but Tatelman said that would come later.

Similarly, Apple's iPhone late last month made its official debut in China sans Wi-Fi.

China Mobile has more than 500 million customers, and Claro serves more than 42 million people in Brazil as part of the America Movil network, Dell said.

Dell did tout its "existing agreements with other leading global telecom providers," including Vodafone in Europe; AT&T and Verizon in the U.S.; M1 and Starhub in Singapore; and Maxis in Malaysia.

The Texas-based PC maker also played up the Internet connectivity angle of small mobile gadgetry.

"Our entry into the smartphone category is a logical extension of Dell's consumer product evolution over the past two years," Ron Garriques, president of the Dell Global Consumer Group, said in a statement. "We are developing smaller and smarter mobile products that enable our customers to take their Internet experience out of the home and do the things they want to do whenever and wherever they want."

But does the world need a smartphone from Dell? The device will have plenty of company: Android phones have begun arriving on the market in larger numbers in recent months.

Most notably, U.S. carrier Verizon Wireless last week began selling the much-hyped Droid, made by Motorola, and the more modest Droid Eris, made by HTC.

Updated at 5:31 a.m. PDT with more details and background information, and again at 8:08 a.m. PDT with clarification on the use of China Mobile's OPhone and confirmation of the screen size..

Updated 1:42 p.m. PDT with background details.

Dell and AT&T plan to launch a smartphone running Google's Android next year, according to a report, as Dell's years-long flirtation with the mobile industry appears ready for the next step.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Dell's smartphone will run Android, which would be another design win to emerge this year for Google's mobile operating system. AT&T's involvement would also mark the fourth major U.S. carrier with plans to support Android, and is particularly interesting given AT&T's status as the exclusive carrier of Apple's iPhone.

Rumors of Dell's involvement with smartphones date back years, but the Wall Street Journal has had a pretty steady stream of stories this year about Dell's evolving plans for the market. In August, Dell showed off in China what it called a "proof of concept" device with no keypad and a touchscreen. That matches the AT&T phone described in the report, but the report also said the expected phone would be somewhat different.

Dell and Google declined to comment on the report.

It's shaping up to be quite a year for Android, after a slow start. Google unveiled the project in the fall of 2007, with the first Android phone arriving late in 2008. But since then, nine phones have launched using the operating system, not counting the two unnamed phones destined for Verizon's network announced Tuesday by Verizon and Google.

It's rapidly becoming the operating system of choice for phone makers who don't want to follow Apple and Research in Motion's strategy of designing the entire device themselves. Wednesday's report arrived as Windows Mobile 6.5 phones were being shown off to lackluster reviews at the CTIA conference, and with a bigger overhaul for Windows Mobile not expected until next year, phone makers are turning to Android.

Motorola, HTC, and Samsung have all come out with Android handsets, and even Nokia has been rumored to be considering Android for either smartphones or Netbooks. Dell, of course, is not a phone maker. The company's involvement in the mobile computing has been on ice ever since it killed its Axim personal digital assistant in 2007, although this year it has dropped steady hints that it wants to get in on one of the fastest growing markets in the technology industry at the moment.

The potential problem for Dell will be one of differentiation, since relatively similar Android phones will all be hitting the market within several months of each other on multiple carriers. Motorola chose to layer a custom user interface over Android called Motoblur in hopes of attracting phone buyers, and it has not been clear from any of the reports whether Dell has made similar investments in software.

China Mobile introduced a new mobile platform Monday, and one of the presenting partners on hand has raised a few eyebrows.

Details of a Dell phone, reportedly called the Mini 3i, began to circulate on the Web almost immediately after being presented at the event, but Dell says it has not yet announced any smartphone for the China market.

A prototype of a Dell smartphone seen at a China Mobile event.

(Credit: Mobile.163.com)

"Dell was there supporting China Mobile as a development partner. We did not confirm or announce anything," said Dell spokesman Matt Parretta.

There was, however, a "proof of concept mobile device prototype" shown off at the event, Parretta said. That explains the photos, which depict a black, candybar-style handset that had a touch screen and was stamped with the Dell logo on the back.

Reports from the China Mobile event, which introduced the wireless operator's Android-based Open Mobile System, or OMS, say the Mini 3i was confined to operate on a 2G GSM network--no Wi-Fi access--but had a 3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and a slot for a microSD card.

Industry observers and market analysts have been largely underwhelmed both by the idea of a Dell smartphone, and according to some who saw early prototypes, the execution of it as well.

Dell is developing a pocket-size Internet device using Google's Android operating system that could take on Apple's iPod Touch, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

Two people who have seen early prototypes of the device told the newspaper it looks like Apple's iPod Touch but slightly larger. And like the iPod Touch, the device isn't expected to include a cellular phone. The device is considered part of a new category of gadgets called mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, which are designed to fit into the market between a mobile phone and a laptop or Netbook computer.

The device could go on sale as early as the second half of 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal's sources.

Dell supposedly started working on the new device about a year ago as a way to compete against Apple's iPod business. The Journal also cited an unnamed source who said that Dell has considered selling the new Internet device through a cell phone carrier. Dell and other computer makers such as Hewlett-Packard already sell their Netbooks through cell phone operators.

Dell has long been rumored to be making a smartphone. And the company has also been rumored to be testing the Android software for its smartphone and possible for its Netbooks. With these developments in the works, it probably wouldn't take much to also develop a portable Internet device using the same operating system without the phone. That's what Apple did with the iPod Touch.

Whenever Dell does unveil its much-hinted-about new handset, it will apparently be taking a nontraditional route to the market, according to an analyst report Monday.

Dell has decided to sell its new product through retailers only, Ashok Kumar of Collins Stewart said. While that's certainly interesting, and in line with Dell's recent record of testing new ways of approaching the market with its products, the reason Kumar gives is far more tantalizing: he says U.S. and European carriers were none too impressed with Dell's effort when the company tried to sign up some wireless partners during a meeting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month.

Dell hasn't sold a handset since it axed the popular Axim in 2007.

(Credit: CNET)

"The carriers, who see products from all the leading handset vendors, have decided to pass on Dell's handset," he wrote in a research note Monday. "Some carriers are citing a noncompelling product with a road map that lags competition."

Dell hasn't responded to a request for comment. But if Kumar's claims are true, this presents serious problems for Dell. The company already has relationships with some of the major carriers, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, to sell wireless-service plans for its notebooks and Netbooks in the United States and in Europe. Rejecting what will, by its very nature, be a high-profile product from a current business partner doesn't speak very well of the product's competitiveness.

Having been rejected from the major carriers will also handicap the device from the start, since U.S. consumers are conditioned to buying subsidized phones and may balk at paying a full price. But the bigger problem is that there's just not that much market share left to grab, especially without the marketing might of large carriers behind it.

"It's a crowded market. Two years ago, (Dell) may have had an opportunity, but (Research In Motion), Nokia, and Apple have been joined by HTC, Samsung, LG, Palm, Motorola, (and Acer)," Kumar said in an interview. "The market is extremely crowded just as it's slowing down."

Verizon Wireless is poised to sell at least one Netbook in the next few months, according to reports in Bloomberg and TheStreet.com.

Both outlets cite unnamed sources, but Bloomberg's source, said to be someone close to the project at Verizon, says a partnership is being negotiated with more than one PC maker. No word on what the service contract for a Netbook from Verizon would entail.

Is Verizon getting ready to sell 3G-enabled Netbooks?

(Credit: Dell)

Currently, Verizon doesn't sell a 3G-enabled Netbook, but chief rival AT&T does. AT&T sells Acer Netbooks for $99 with service through RadioShack, and also sells Dell Mini Inspirons through the wireless provider's Web site. Though Verizon isn't confirming the report, a move to sell Netbooks is widely seen as a way to keep up with its rival.

The report suggests Verizon is working with more than one PC vendor, and Dell seems like an obvious candidate as one of them, though a Dell representative did not have an immediate comment. Dell already has a relationship with Verizon parent company Vodafone, which has sold Dell Netbooks in Europe since September 2008.

So who could be the other Netbook maker? A similar rumor floated around the Web last week regarding HP hooking up with Verizon. HP had no comment, but provided a statement from Kevin Frost, HP's general manager of consumer notebooks: "It's natural for carriers the world over to be interested in HP's broad portfolio of thin and light minis. We are talking with carriers all over the world. We are talking with carriers all over the world."

Netbooks are the fastest-growing category of PCs in the last year. Starting from virtually zero in late 2007, 10 million Netbooks were shipped by the end of 2008, accounting for 7 percent of all portable PCs shipped.

The limited capability of Netbooks is also intended to be their appeal: they're basically good for getting online and doing light word processing. But their small size makes them easily transportable, and having the ability to access the Web easily and from anywhere only increases their value. Though the bundled Internet-service model has failed in the U.S. in the past, our reliance on the Web makes it seem like this model could fare better this time around.

We've been hearing rumors of a Dell smartphone for a while now, but The Wall Street Journal gave more shape to the speculation with a report Thursday that the PC maker "has had a group of engineers working on the phones for more than a year from an office in the Chicago area."

Michael Dell has dropped smartphone hints in the past.

(Credit: Dell)

The paper quoted sources close to the plans as saying the team produced prototypes built on Google's Android operating system and Microsoft Windows Mobile (which would you prefer?). One model has a touch screen but no physical keyboard, a la Apple's iPhone, the WSJ says, while another is a slider-style device with a keypad that slides out from under the screen.

Reiterating Dell's earlier tight-lipped stance on the matter, a Dell representative said the company hasn't disclosed any such plans, adding "we haven't committed to anything."

But the WSJ says the smartphone development team spent much of last year meeting with suppliers of phone components, phone software companies, and Asian phone manufacturers.

Amid a , smartphones are a logical horizon for PC makers to eye.

While not all smartphones are faring equally well, the sector overall is still healthy. Growth was at about 50 percent until recently. It is still at a 10 percent to 15 percent growth level at the moment--and that marks a healthy market, according to Jeff Kagan, a wireless and telecommunications industry analyst.

"So will Dell devices hit a home, run or will they just hit a single? That is the big question," he said. "We won't know until we know more about it. So much depends on the device."

Dell's been out of the handheld business for over a year and a half, but there have been signs it's been testing the waters, such as its acquisition of streaming-audio software maker Zing Systems in August.