We’re sure that Dell is keeping its options open, but at the Intel Development Forum last week it showed a product which very much tried to keep both feet in the Intel camp ‘ a device which can convert from a netbook to a Windows tablet.
Now we’ve all seen these before, about 6 year ago when tablet PCs were out. Their disadvantage was that they cost a fortune, the touch screen wasn’t very sensitive, Windows had not been adapted well enough for touch and they weighed about four pounds. In that instance a very precarious twisting mechanism turned the screen from being part of a netbook/notebook style device into a tablet PC. These twisting hinges broke quite often, so that gave them more of a disadvantage. What Dell has invented in the Dell Inspiron Duo instead is a square frame around the screen with a hinge right through it, so that the screen can turn 180 degrees within the frame, a completely new way of turning a PC into a tablet. The screen is a capacitive touch screen.
It is ideas like this that will make the humble notebook somewhat resilient against tablets. There will be more and more innovation in the months ahead, but it will not hold back most tablet buyers. Our feeling is that for consumers, why not buy a tablet and be done with it, and one option is the Dell Streak, a 5 inch device which we recently looked at in detail and found to be almost Apple-like in its ease of use.
Poor Dell has to try everything in its armory to keep up ‘ it has to offer genuine netbooks, knowing that they are going out of style, it needs to come to market with a full Windows 7 tablet to be true to its roots. It needs a range of Android tablets, of which the Streak is the first, and it needs to try to keep Notebooks alive. The pitch on this device is that tablet Qwerty keyboards are too slow, so why not spin the display around and uncover a genuine keyboard and type at twice the speed.
What will undo this device, when it comes to market, is that it is driven by an Intel dual-core Atom processor and runs Windows 7 Premium. That will make the battery run out fast, in say 3 to 4 hours and if they add more battery it will weigh a ton (or about twice the weight of a tablet we reckon). Analysts shown the device were not allowed to even hold it, in case they were able to guess its weight.
What might be more interesting is if this idea was applied to an Android device, which is run by an ARM based chip (like the Qualcomm Snapdragon). Then the addition of a lightweight keyboard would not make this much heavier than an iPad, and given that there have been multiple covers and additional keyboards added to the iPad, all of which make it heavier, this system of hinging could be a genuine market innovation. By being Android based it would also have access to an App Store.
One analyst called the 10 inch screen Dell Duo a ‘Netvertible’ and not surprisingly Dell gave no word on price or release date. In fact it may never get released. But an Android version you might better describe as a Padbook or Slatebook, and it may well have a future.