Photos: Jim Merithew and Jon Snyder/Wired.com

You can’t deny Dell some hard-fought gee-whiz cred with the new Inspiron Duo.

In a world of commoditized portables, it is nothing if not a unique product. Show it off to your friends; it looks like a netbook, and you pop open the laptop-like clamshell and wait for the bored expression to appear. Then comes the sucker punch: you rotate the screen horizontally within its frame and snap the laptop back shut. Ta-da, it’s a freakin’ tablet, bro! People are duly impressed. It’s a neat trick and, at the very least, a clever feat of engineering.

But what is the Dell Inspiron Duo? Cut through the mystery and you will find — sorry to burst your bubble — a Windows netbook with a rotating touchscreen.

And that begs the question, what is it good for?

Well, we’re still working on that one.

This is the problem with dual-function gadgets in general: They rarely do either of the things they’re designed for very well. As a netbook, the Duo is at least passable. While it’s heavier than other 10-inch netbooks by up to half a pound, it’s well designed and looks good, and the 1366 x 768 screen’s brightness is about average for the category. But performance is unfortunately poor all around (a 1.5-GHz Atom doesn’t get you very far), and the two measly USB ports could stand an upgrade.

As a tablet, the Duo fares considerably worse. Here, its three pounds of heft are way too much for extended use, and the clamshell design adds an uncomfortable thickness to the device that makes it hard to hold. The screen also suffers from the same poor viewing-angle problems that sunk the Streak 7. If you’re not holding it dead on, the screen is virtually illegible.

Of course, the biggest problem here really isn’t Dell’s fault, it’s that Windows just doesn’t work very well for touchscreen devices, especially not on a small scale like this. Use the Duo in tablet mode for more than three minutes and your skin starts to crawl. You want to get something done quickly. You try to hit Control-C. Soon you find you’re reaching over and over for a keyboard that isn’t there. Except, of course, it is. Thank God for that.

WIRED 320GB hard drive is bigger than my laptop’s. Flipping system works well, feels sturdy. Dell Stage custom launcher app loads automatically in tablet mode, makes Windows a bit more useful as a slate. Duo Audio Station ($100 more) adds much-improved audio and a vertical docking system.

TIRED Tediously slow all around; get used to a lot of waiting. Screen is hideous. Too heavy for regular, table-free use.

Photos courtesy of Dell

A little under a year ago we saw an extensive leak of forthcoming Dell smartphones, including the Thunder and Flash, and now thanks to Android Central and WPCentral, we’ve been treated to this year’s Dell roadmap detailing not only their future phone plans, but their tablet ones too.

This time there are a lot of devices, but not a lot of detail, and all the cool names seem to have been used up too.  Let’s start with some tablets.  Running Android Honeycomb, we’ve got the Gallo in Q2, the Sterling in Q4 and the Silver Oak and Opus One in Q1 2012. With Windows 7 onboard, the Rosemount should appear at the end of Q2, with the Peju coming in early 2012. The Peju won’t be running Android or Windows 7, but Windows 8!

When you add in a Streak 7 update and a ‘handwriting’ variation of the Android-based Gallo, that’s nine tablets we can expect from Dell over the next 12 months.

Moving on to the phones and things become a little more informative. In Q3 this year, the Wrigley 4″ portrait slider is scheduled, and it looks similar to the Dell Venue Pro. It runs Windows Phone 7, but has ‘next gen’ next to its name, which could indicate the Mango build we’ve been hearing about recently.

Following on a couple of months later will be the Hancock, a side-sliding QWERTY phone running Android Ice Cream and featuring a dual-core 1GHz processor. It’ll be joined by the Millenium, a traditional touchscreen slab with a 4.3″ screen and a 1GHz dual-core processor. The pair also have 8 megapixel cameras and 1080p video capabilities.

It’s impossible to know whether all these devices are set for production, but nothing (aside from the Windows 8 tablet maybe) looks totally out of place. If the Gallo turns up in early April, then the outlook is good for the rest.

Make no mistake: Dell will not be sitting out the Tablet Wars the way it did during the Struggle Against Smartphones. No, Dell is fighting, and by that I mean it is intent on pouring money into what is obviously a hole of futility.

Its latest volley in the skirmish is the Dell Streak 7, an overgrown version of the 5-inch tablet it kinda-sorta released last year. And in most ways the Streak 7 is a typical Dell affair: foolishly overdesigned in an attempt to stand out, and coming up short all around.

The size (7 inches diagonal) and operating system (dusty old Android 2.2) pit the Streak 7 squarely against the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Sadly, that is a battle that the Streak loses on virtually every front. Are looks important to you? The weird slopes and baffling button placement of the Streak 7 make it less comfortable to hold and far less pretty than the Tab. Or perhaps you’d like a something with a really nice display? The Streak 7 is an utter disaster on this front. It’s bad enough that the 800 x 480 display looks visibly chunky, but the viewing angle is so poor that moving your head even a few degrees from dead center creates a screen-door effect so bad that it borders on nauseating. It’s not just the worst tablet display I’ve ever seen, it’s the worst display of any kind I’ve seen since the dawn of the LCD screen.

Other drawbacks are palpable but pale next to the screen debacle: The Streak 7 can’t charge at all via USB — not even trickle charge. It needs wall power, and it gets incredibly hot to the touch after a few hours of use. Well, after an hour of use: We thought we were in for an easy “Tired” when we read reports that the Streak 7 could only muster five hours of battery life vs. seven or more for its competition. We were aghast when it turned out that the tablet crapped out after a mere two hours (and three minutes!) of video watching on the device (tested with radios on).

There is but one bright spot with the Streak 7, and that is performance: Equipped with the hype-fueled Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, the tablet absolutely rips at web page rendering, app loading, running Flash, and just about everything else. If we could actually make out the display, and the battery alert wasn’t constantly threatening to shut the thing down, it’d be totally awesome.

WIRED: Fast. Cheap.

TIRED: Mattel Football had a better screen. Dismal battery life. Crashed twice — once going dark for an hour — in the first day of testing.

Photos: Jonathan Snyder/Wired

Now we don’t have much more to go on here than some analyst chatter and a lengthy article from TechCrunch, but if you believe what you read, a major player has just dropped Windows Phone 7 devices from its roadmap. And that player is Dell. According to Jonathan Goldberg, an telecom analyst at Deutsche Bank, the only remaining partners currently working on Windows Phone 7 handsets are HTC, Samsung, and LG. If this is true (and that’s a big if), that means that the seriously awesome looking Dell Lightning that we spied in leaks recently will never see the light of day — as a WP7 device, at least.

We already knew that HP was out of the game (instead focusing on webOS phones), but the casual suggestion that Dell has made for the door here is somewhat suspect. The company itself hasn’t made any statements (we’ve reached out but have yet to hear back), and while Dell has certainly concentrated a lot of effort on Android devices recently, its partnership with Microsoft is long-standing (despite dabbling in the world of open source). If the story turns out to be true, it could spell mixed (if not outright bad) tidings for the Windows Phone 7 launch, which Goldberg alleges may cost Microsoft upwards of half a billion dollars — no small fee. Losing two of the biggest computer-makers in the world can’t feel very good when you’re trying to fight your way back to relevancy, but at least on the bright side, neither HP nor Dell have a track record of making anything other than heroically mediocre handsets. Take this all with a grain of salt right now, however, as the author of the TechCrunch article provides no source for the statements from Goldberg, and… well, he’s an analyst, and they’re prone to making up all kinds of crazy things. We’re investigating, and will let you know as soon as we have more info.

Update: We’ve been pinged back by Dell’s Matt Parretta, and he was 100 percent clear that Dell was most certainly still part of the Windows Phone 7 game. In the company’s words:

Any reports, or speculation, that report Dell will not support Windows Phone 7 are false… Microsoft announced Dell as a supporting partner at this year’s Mobile World Congress and nothing’s changed. We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7, and are looking forward to bringing customers amazing mobile experiences.

Furthermore, the analyst in question here (Jonathan Goldberg) has also reached out to us to clarify his statements, saying that he believes Dell is still a partner on Windows Phone 7, just not a launch partner. Dell was mum on release schedules, but one thing is clear — they intend to follow through on this collaboration.

Dell dropping Windows Phone 7 devices from its roadmap? (update: Dell responds, is definitely still in the game) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Cell Phones, Computers

Apparently today is the day that everyone announces the products we knew were coming. After Motorola and Verizon drew early attention for announcing the extensively leaked Droid 2, Dell and AT&T finally announced the official availability of the Dell Streak. The five-inch Android powered tablet will go on “priority pre-sale” Thursday with general availability coming Friday. What can be described as either an extremely tiny tablet or an incredibly over-sized cell phone will run you $299.99 with a two-year contract, or $549.99 without one.

The 512MB of RAM and 1Ghz processor will make sure it will do fine the speed department. Despite having just been announced, the Streak is already looking long in the tooth with its 800×480 resolution screen (same found on the smaller 3.7-inch Nexus One) and Android 1.6 OS (which is now two major iterations behind). Still, it could make a compelling option for those who are intrigued by the iPad, but are more concerned with placing calls than reading books. Check out what our friends’ at Engadget thought of the Streak if you’re on the fence about ordering one.

Dell Streak Tablet/Phone Lands on AT&T this Thursday for $299.99 originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Computers

Dell is apparently eager to compete with Best Buy and Walmart for the title of most despised retailer in the country. A few months back, a tech support rep got in trouble for turning on a woman’s webcam without her permission. Then, last month, the company got nabbed knowingly shipping faulty PCs. And, just this week, the Texas-based manufacturer was caught shipping motherboards infected with malware. Now, a woman from California is alleging that a support technician for Dell stole nude photos of her from her PC and posted them online, and then charged $800 worth of computer gear to her credit card for another woman in Tennessee.

This is not a cut-and-dry case of a misbehaving tech rep, though. This drama has actually been going on for almost a year, and only now is Tara Fitzgerald coming forward with her accusations. Try and follow the sequence of events, and make sense of Fitzgerald’s often questionable judgment.

Continue reading Dell Tech Swipes Nude Photos of Gullible Customer

Dell Tech Swipes Nude Photos of Gullible Customer originally appeared on Switched on Sat, 31 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Computers

These are dark times for Dell. As we reported last month, the computer manufacturer has been under fire for knowingly selling over 11.8 million faulty computers, and is currently embroiled in yet another lawsuit. Now it comes to light that some of the motherboards it recently sent out were filled with malware. The company has admitted as much, saying that the problems have only affected a “small number” of their PowerEdge PCs. According to DigitalTrends, the malware is showing up in the server management firmware embedded in the boards, and is really only affecting enterprise-level servers, not consumer computers.

But, in even worse news, the company settled yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud charges — to the tune of $100 million. According to the SEC’s allegations, Dell misled investors by padding its quarterly statements with money it had received from Intel during back-room agreements to not use chips made by competitor Advanced Micro Devices. Investors were not made aware of the dealings, and Dell was able to project greater financial results than it had actually achieved. [From: DigitalTrends and New York Times]

Bad Day for Dell: Company Fined $100M and Gets Caught With Infected Motherboards originally appeared on Switched on Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Computers

Built-in obsolescence has been a common business strategy among electronics makers for the last half century, at least. Why make a gizmo that can last forever when you could make one that fails in a few years, leading to repeat purchases and bolstered revenue? Dell, the notoriously economical computer maker, took the opposite track; when it found out that 11.8 million of its desktops were filled with faulty components, it decided to sell them anyway — and even tried to conceal the dangers that these failures could cause.

The New York Times reports that when the University of Texas complained to Dell that its math facility’s computers were dying, the company told them that they were simply exhausting the CPUs with their fancy equations. In reality, Dell was completely aware that it had sent the school faulty electronics, riddled with problems like leaking capacitors procured from Asian suppliers. And while Dell wasn’t the only company affected by these ramshackle components (since Hewlett-Packard and Apple both use the same supplier, Nichicon), it did receive the lion’s share of bad electronics, which it then stuck into its OptiPlex desktops. Even the legal firm representing Dell in a current, three-year-old lawsuit — initiated by a company called Advanced Internet Technologies that had received 2,000 bad workstations — unknowingly got the damaged goods for its own offices.

Continue reading Lawsuit Against Dell Reveals Company Knew About Bad Components

Lawsuit Against Dell Reveals Company Knew About Bad Components originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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