Dell to ship 7-inch tablet in weeks, 10-inch within a year
updated 10:05 am EDT, Wed September 29, 2010
Dell says 7-inch Android tablet ships soon
Dell's mainland China President Amit Midha today said the company's seven-inch Android tablet would ship much sooner than expected. The slate should arrive sometime in the "next few weeks" for an unknown price. A well-known 10-inch model should arrive within six to 12 months, he also told Dow Jones.
There will also be three-, four- and secondary 10-inch devices coming, with the three-inch device coming roughly at the same time as the seven-inch Android hardware. Some of these will be using Windows, Midha said. One of these should be the four-inch Lightning, a Windows Phone 7 vertical slider.
Chrome OS is still only being considered, the executive added.
The release schedule is much faster than for the Streak and suggests much more active interest in tablets than for much of the past year. The five-inch device was shown to us in January but only shipped seven months later, still using the same Android 1.6 release that it had when it appeared at the CES technology expo. A much faster seven-inch release would help stem the effect of the iPad, which was unveiled after the Streak but still managed to ship over four months earlier.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 2004
1.6 Android hurt the Streak
Dell, in case you are impossibly niave - which I hope not, but you are acting as if you are - let me tell 'you' (because Dell is reading macnn daily, hahaha)....
We, the american consumers, cannot assume the carrier will do an OTA to a later version of Android.
Here is what happens, and I'll use Blackberry (and BB OS) as an example, but the thinking will apply to Dell & Android, we don't have a track record for you in the cell business of any length.
So - RIM announces BB OS 6 is coming out. Then eventually they announce the legacy devices they've decided to support. Most users are cut out, right then - but if you are lucky enough to make the cut, guess what OS 6 won't be released for months. Many months after that, the carriers will start evaluating it. A year later, they'll decide so much time has past, nobody is still waiting on it - so they don't release it at all.
Even if you made the first cut, you may never make the second cut. But even if you make both the first and second cut, you are waiting a seriously long time...you may get BB OS 6, about the time BB OS 7 has been released.
Now every Chinese no-nothing in the world has Android 2.2 running on their generic phone and tablet, its on sale on e-bay already - you, meanwhile, got stuck on 1.6 - not a good sign already.
Now we are supposed to trust, not just you but the entire supply change to get together and manage an OTA update to 2.2 before 3.0 is already the standard?
Hardly - get your act together.