After being given detention last year for the bizarre juxtaposition of the XPS 10 and the Latitude 10, Dell have done their homework and handed in a couple of decent assignments. Or at least they turned up to class and made it look like they were working, the product looks promising but we haven't been able to assess it properly yet.
Dell have been getting around doing roadshows for their clients again and at the one I attended recently, the sales guys came armed with a couple of new models that piqued my interest. The first was a new 11 inch touch enabled Netbook available in Intel or AMD (pending confirmation), starting at AUD$500. The jury was still out at Dell as to whether the machine would actually ship with an AMD (Kabini core) CPU, but the Intel version was confirmed. It will bear the recently revived Celeron brand, which is just the Bay Trail Atom platform in (poor) disguise. Having adopted the Clover Trail Atom this year, we can assume this will represent good computing power for the dollars. That and a touch-screen for that money makes for a decent little device that should run Windows 8 quite competently. Much better than the previous generations of Netbook, that were too crippled to even run Windows XP Starter Edition, which was one or two generations older than the current Windows OS at the time. The device itself looks and feels nice too, but that's all I can say at this point. The example I saw was a piece of wood and plastic, not actually a working example, and some specs such as the SSD/eMMC used were a little hazy, but it's clear that Dell are aiming this at schools, who previously bought up tons of these sorts of machines. It'll remain to be seen whether those schools can wash the bad taste of old-school Netbooks out of their mouths and put down their fisher-price tablets or cheap-and-cheerful Chromebooks to consider this sort of device.
Dell is also packing a Surface competitor in it's new lineup. By that I mean, they'll be selling an Intel Core i series tablet with a magnetic keyboard-cover. Sounds familiar. The Dell Surface knock-off isn't as pretty as the Microsoft device (I have no pictures to back that up, it wasn't allowed), but it is designed to be more serviceable, including things like a removable battery and some clue how you might open it up. It does come with an active stylus - also like Surface - which should make those schools that drank the pen based computing Kool-Aid happy. Pricing was indicated to be competitive with Surface Pro as well, so it looks like there might be a viable enterprise-grade alternative out there soon.
Not bad Dell. I'd give you an A, but I'll wait until I'm able to mark your work first. Last year, I went to two of these Dell Roadshow events, and this one had more interesting new gear than the last two put together. Last year, all they had was the XPS-12, which was fine, but not student-friendly. Nice to see some improvement. I await further details and the NDA's to lift.
