Filed under: Products and services, Dell (DELL)
After seeing news about the Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) “E” mobile internet device (read: miniature laptop) last week, I was perplexed. True, Asus has had excellent luck with the Eee Computer and Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) has announced a similar miniature laptop-type Personal computer. But for some reason, Dell’s new product is being marketed as the device for the “30-minute web experience.”
The new Dell E will come in two screen configurations — a 12″ and an 8.9″. Basically, these are standard laptop PCs with scaled down hardware and ambitions, meant to fill the hole between the smartphone (or iPhone) and the full, 45-second-to-boot laptop Personal computer. I thought this experiment was already run years ago with the ridiculously-priced UMPCs, which cost as much or more than a standard laptop PC. The good news is that Dell and HP’s creations are starting out at a nice price point: $299.
This is basically a new price point for a laptop Computer, no matter what the marketing states. This is good news for consumers. The combination of physical size, power and price might finally sway some buyers who really need a portable, instantly-usable laptop Computer for short bursts of time. That, or the market will prove that there just isn’t a profitable spot between a smartphone with PC-like functions and a fully-usable laptop PC. That’s, until all the things you do on a laptop focus around web access utilities and not applications like Microsoft Word and Excel and Adobe Photoshop.
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