Dell had previously shown its rumored tablet device to only a few lucky journos at CES this year. Now, Mr. Neeraj Choubey, the company’s GM of tablets division, has told Wired.com that Dell Mini 5 won’t be a single tablet PC, instead a family of tablets varying in sizes, along with other advances over iPad which will help in truly creating a separate category of tablet PCs. We really hope they see value in adding a sliding QWERTY to the design.
Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc., says that the Mini 5 will debut “in a couple of months” and will run on Android (2.0 or higher).
Dell Mini 5 specs:
- 5-MP camera on the back
- Separate front-facing camera (for video conferencing)
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity
- Snapdragon 1-GHz processor.
- 5-inch screen (will look more like a PSP, rather than a netbook)
Aiming to make the Mini 5 a device optimized for media consumption, Mr. Choubey goes on to say that
“It will offer the full web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop.”
Dell promises that the tablet won’t be simply a coffee-table PC, instead it will be a powerful productivity tool, while adding that it can offer an app market as strong as the App Store of Apple (no of free apps on the Android store should help). It will also provide services for easy and seamless synchronization of different media and data between your PC and the Tablet. Mr. Choubey adds:
“At a very basic level, you would have a service that will share content across the devices seamlessly and have it in the cloud”
Dell is working to get its carrier tie-ups correct and certainly they would be looking to beat the $29 unlimited data plan that iPad offers.
I think it will be great for a “On the go” type of device, but it’s definitely not big enough to use as a e-reader.