Michael Dell Confirms Smartphone for US in 2010

On the trend of increasing sales of cheap netbooks – mostly being manufactured by Far Eastern companies – Dell said there are “a fair amount of customers not being that satisfied with the smaller screen and lower performance part – unless it’s a secondary machine, or it’s the very first machine. And the expectations are pretty low.

“But as a replacement for a high-performing machine for an experienced user, this is not a good experience, and we don’t see users being very happy in that scenario,” Dell said.

In explaining how various computer form factors need to be closer fits for their daily usage, Dell told about a new product his company has designed and is currently marketing to schools, the Lattitude 2100.

“It looks like a netbook or notebook, but it’s actually a system,” Dell said. “It comes on a cart, with a whole bunch of these things. They come in different colours, you roll the cart in, you take them out, give them to the students. You pump them back in, they charge up, they have the networking all built in. Our sales of this 2100 system have been many times what we thought, and the schools just love it, because it fits their application really perfectly.”

However, as a general-purpose notebook [for the business market], Dell said, the 2100 “is not really a great solution because of the screen size and performance.”