Dell has lowered the price of its Windows RT tablet from $449 to $299. The drop in price of the XPS 10 slate, possibly due to the underwhelming sales of Windows RT-based tablets across the industry, is accompanied by discounted additions to the tablet, including the keyboard dock and doubling the internal storage.
Dell has introduced its most interesting and innovative Windows 8 device to date. The new XPS 18 all-in-one is both a desktop PC as well as a large Windows 8 tablet that includes a built-in 69Whr battery good for up to 5 hours use. It is also a relatively manageable 4.87 pounds, which Dell says helps to ‘redefine the desktop.’
Dell has put a number of its previously-revealed computers up for pre-order. The XPS 12 convertible tablet notebook, XPS One 27 All-In-One, and the Inspiron One 23 Windows 8-enabled systems are all set to ship soon after the Microsoft operating system release at the end of October.
Dell has revived its Duo line with the launch of the XPS Duo 12 for Windows 8. The company had previously launched the Inspiron Duo featuring a similar flip hinge design, as a convertible netbook running the less touch friendly Windows 7. The all-new XPS Duo 12, however, is a much more premium product incorporating top-tier materials including machined aluminum, carbon fiber as well as Corning Gorilla Glass.
Dell's flagship XPS line is being expanded with the addition of the XPS 14 and XPS 15 laptops. The two new laptops are supplied with third-generation Ivy Bridge processors, Corning Gorilla Glass, and a machined aluminum case. Both of the new machines can be fitted with optional 3G or LTE connectivity, increasing utility when out of range of a Wi-Fi base station.
Dell is refreshing its all-in-one PC offerings with the introduction of the XPS One 27, Inspiron One 23 and Inspiron One 20. The new XPS becomes Dell's largest all-in-one machine and leans towards more high-end components, while both Inspirons are aimed at more budget-conscious family users wanting to save desktop space.
Intel's Ivy Bridge has had its mobile side tested early in unofficial benchmarks. Bulgaria's Laptop.bg was given a reference notebook with the unreleased 2.3GHz, quad Core i7-3610QM and overall saw a clear performance edge over the current 2.2GHz Core i7-2670QM. In CPU tests for Cinebench 10 and 11, the difference was between eight and 22 percent, respectively.
New leaks have pointed to the full-size Dell XPS 15 getting much slimmer along with its 2012 revamp. The Netherlands' Tweakers.net provided both a photo and claims that the mid-size notebook would fall from a very thick 1.5-inch body down to a more MacBook Pro-like 0.95 inches. Its new design should have a 15.6-inch, 1080p white LED-backlit display with edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass on top.
Dell may be prepping an updated version of its mid-sized XPS 15 laptop. Dell-Lab has posted potential specs for the 15-inch XPS L521X. The blog has been fairly accurate in past Dell product information.
Dell has begun shipping its XPS 13 ultrabook. Dell unveiled the computer at CES in January. The device bears a strong resemblance to the Apple MacBook Air, albeit with a heavier body.
Dell on Tuesday reported results that it touted as producing records but which signaled continued problems in its mainstay home PC business. Although its revenue was up two percent from winter a year ago to just over $16 billion, its profit was down 18 percent to $764 million. The largest drag was in the consumer group, where its revenue dipped two percent to $3.2 billion and it saw an extremely sharp 43 percent drop in operating income to $39 million.
The 13- to 14-inch notebook screen size is currently one of the hottest areas of competition right now: it's where Apple, HP, and others start off their higher-end models. Dell has certainly been one of the most active in this space and has brought its high-end XPS line to that space through the 14z. We'll check in our Dell XPS 14z review whether the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the Sony VAIO S, or comparable rivals will feel the strain.
Dell is trying an unusual strategy to try and steer ultrabook buyers towards the XPS 13 on Thursday. Nicknamed the Ultrabook Challenge, the demo campaign Thursday amounts to a blind taste test for the thin-and-light notebooks. Starting in San Francisco first, those at the corner of Chestnut and Scott, and later at Fisherman's Wharf, are being asked to pick an ultrabook based on "look and feel" with all the branding covered up, ostensibly to avoid bias.
We've at last had a first-hand look at the upcoming Dell XPS 13 on the CES show floor. The ultrabook on an initial glance bears more than a passing resemblance to the MacBook Air, down to the side port layouts and the single-piece, multi-touch trackpad; there's no question of who inspired the design. It remains something of its own beast, however, and the combination of aluminum (mostly on the lid) as well as a tightly constructed body give it a much more premium feel than we're used to from Dell.
Dell has rolled out its new XPS 13 ultrabook, a 13-inch notebook in a 12-inch form factor. The XPS 13 is highlighted by its edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass display and a thin bezel framing its HD WLED 1366x678 display. It also incorporates a full-size backlit keyboard and pairs second-gen Core i-series processors with fast SSDs.
Dell is whittling back one of its staple practices at CES in a sign of a reduced focus on the home for 2012. New leaks Wednesday hinted to AllThingsD that the company would drop its near-traditional occupation of a whole floor at The Palms off of the Las Vegas strip in favor of the hotel suite invites and meeting rooms common to companies that don't have major products to unveil at the show. If would instead attach itself to a keynote from one of its partners, implying Intel or Microsoft.
Dell reported a tough summer quarter on Tuesday evening that showed the deeper impact of tablets and rivals. Its revenue was almost exactly flat over a year ago, dipping slightly to almost $15.37 billion. Although its net profit was up 17 percent to $893 million, its consumer group that covers its home PC business saw a six percent drop in revenue and was joined by problems in its public sector PCs and services as well as nearly flat growth in all but its international field, which covered developing countries.
Dell's supermodel-thin XPS 14z notebook is now up for sale. It starts at $1,000 and includes a 2.4GHz Core i5 processor, a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, and a 14-inch, 1366x768 display. That 0.9-inch thick body also houses 6GB of RAM and a 500GB, 7,200RPM hard drive, along with a dual-layer DVD reader that can burn CDs or single-layer DVDs.
Coming quickly on the heels of new MacBook Pros, Dell has formally launched the XPS 14z. Its system is conspicuously targeted at Apple's 13-inch notebook and uses LG's Shuriken panel tech to get a 14-inch, 1366x768 screen into the size of a 13-inch design. Unlike the exaggeration of the XPS 15z, the 14z is genuinely thinner at exactly 0.9 inches and lighter at 4.36 pounds.
Dell once again staked out a position against Apple Thursday with word that it would launch the XPS 14z. A 14-inch version of the XPS 15z we reviewed earlier, it will stay under an inch thick with the screen size. Dell bills it as the "world's thinnest fully-featured laptop" at 0.9 inches, attempting to once again challenge the MacBook Pro for the title among systems with optical drives.
Samsung suffered a minor but symbolic loss to Apple on Wednesday after the UK's Advertising Standards Authority rejected a Samsung request. The independent regulator denied Samsung's attempts to have Apple pull its "world's thinnest smartphone" claim for the iPhone 4 on the grounds that the Galaxy S II was thinner. While most of the Android phone's body is thinner at 8.7mm, the bottom bulge for the speaker and the top one for the camera made it considerably thicker at 9.9mm and didn't beat Apple's consistent 9.3mm.
Dell on Tuesday epitomized the tough conditions for Windows PC builders with flat results and a poor outlook. Its overall revenue, as well as its home and large business PC revenues, were up just one percent over a year earlier. While its net income was up 60 percent to just over $1 billion, the company warned that its summer performance would be flat and lowered its growth expectations for the whole year, down from five to nine percent to just one to five percent.
Dell has often been associated with capable but often workhorse systems, but it has regularly tried to go after the premium audience dominated by Apple: the Adamo line was a clear shot across the bow of the MacBook Air, for example. It's coming back to this arena in a very different way with the XPS 15z, a 15.6-inch system that promises more of the style of a Mac (in this case the MacBook Pro) with a mainstream price. We'll gauge in our XPS 15z review whether it's successful as a Windows notebook and whether it might collect a few would-be or current Mac users along the way.
Microsoft has used its presentation at Computex in Taiwan to show off Windows 8 and detail newly toughened requirements. The OS' flexibility was such that it was shown on anything from a basic tablet up to performance notebooks, such as a Dell XPS or a future HP dv6 running AMD Llano that will ship later in the spring. ARM-based prototypes were on view at the same time and even included a quad-core NVIDIA Kal-El notebooks and tablets that could use hardware-accelerated HTML5 rendering, much like an x86 system.
Consumer Reports' refreshed notebook rankings [sub. required] gave Apple the top spot in virtually all notebook rankings. As of late May, the updated MacBook Pros led the 15-inch category with 76 to 78 points versus Dell's XPS 15 at 73 points, while the 17-inch models just edged ahead of the HP dv7 (79 points) with 80 and 81 points. All of the 13-inch models placed second at 70 to 72 points, but they were only topped by Apple's own 13-inch MacBook Air, which leapt ahead at 76 points.
(Update: US pricing) Dell skipped formal announcements and gave Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan sales of the XPS 15z. The design is supposedly the thinnest 15-inch notebook in the world at 0.97 inches and is also light, at 5.5 pounds. Its design is less conspicuously based on the MacBook Pro with a black palmrest but still has numerous similarities, down to the five-dot battery life indicator, grilles, and backlit keyboard.
A leak late Sunday confirmed that Dell's XPS 15z would formally launch on Tuesday. The 15.6-inch system had already been teased and its $999 price leaked but now had a relatively close announcement. The WSJ also backed suspicions of a heavy Apple influence with an assertion that the 15z was made to "better compete against Apple's popular Macbook [sic]" and that it would be the thinnest notebook of its size "on the planet."
Dell in a new Facebook teaser on Friday gave clues to its new ultrathin notebook and raised serious concerns about its originality. Without giving clues as to features, it showed the XPS 15Z, a 'thin, powerful, intuitive' shape which borrowed very heavily from Apple's unibody MacBook Pro. The design shares the same all-silver frame and black bezel, patterned speaker grills on either side of a chiclet keyboard, and even a five-dot, button-activated battery indicator.
Images of an upcoming Dell notebook, the XPS 15z, have shown up on the web thanks to Mobile-Review. Not much is known of the computer, other than that it sports a 15.6-inch screen. Processor choice will include the latest Core i5 and i7 chips from Intel.
Dell has just announced changes to its XPS notebooks, including the XPS 15 and XPS 17. The exteriors have been freshened up and now house Intel's Huron River mainboards and Sandy Bridge-era dual- and quad-core processors paired with NVIDIA graphics. A newly available XPS 17 supports 3DTV natively, including 3D Blu-ray discs. The regular version of this notebook has NVIDIA's Optimus live graphics switching to improve battery life.
Dell started off the week with word that it was dropping the smallest of its new XPS line, the XPS 14. It sold beyond estimates, but the company decided in the switch to Sandy Bridge-based Core processors to "re-focus" its strategy by bringing some of the user feedback on the 14-inch notebook into "future thin and light products." The resulting spinoff would happen sometime later in 2011, Engadget heard.
Alienware, HP and MSI have stopped selling computers powered by Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors due to a design flaw in the chips. Intel said performance of the SATA2 ports on the mainboard can degrade over time. HP and MSI will hold back products with the chips, and Alienware removed the buy page for its m17x gaming notebook. HP, apart from pulling some of its models, will also delay a business product demo scheduled for February 10 in San Francisco.
Hybrid Audio LLC late Tuesday joined in a spate of recent lawsuits by suing Apple, Dell and HTC. The Tyler, Texas-based complaint accuses all three of violating a patent for processing MP3 songs using a tree-structured array. The lawsuit claimed that Apple's iPad, iPhone 4, iPod nano, iTunes and MacBook Pro all violate the patent; Dell's Adamo, Alienware, Inspiron, Studio and XPS systems have been similarly named, as have its Aero smartphone, the Streak tablet and HTC's Evo 4G.
With the premium Adamo XPS notebook discontinued and the more recent introduction of XPS notebooks, Dell has rebranded its lineup for greater simplicity. According to Engadget, there will be only three core brands, including Inspiron, XPS and Alienware. Each will be aimed at users who require different performance levels, with Alienware being the top-rung offering.
Dell chief marketing officer Paul-Henri Ferrand today said his company was spending "hundreds of millions" on a marketing campaign to improve its image and better compete against Apple. He wanted to swing the company's focus away from price above all else and towards more upscale systems like the new XPS line. The executive added that it would come with a shift to mobile devices, with both the seven-inch Android tablet and the Inspiron Duo netbook/tablet hybrid due on Monday.
Dell today overhauled its high-end notebooks on Thursday with an entirely new XPS line. The systems are all more refined with aluminum lids and palmrests, and they now carry JBL 2.1-channel speakers as well as the first webcams officially greenlit by Skype. NVIDIA's Optimus live graphics switching and 3DTV Play over HDMI are both core features, and certain models support Intel's WiDi (Wireless Display) to push video without cables.
Toshiba on Wednesday updated its notebooks with Windows 7 and a rare promise among Windows PC makers. The company promises that all of its systems running the new OS, including its touchscreen models, will go without any icons on the desktop except for the default Recycle Bin. System performance should get a boost as the PCs will run as little software in the background as possible, in many cases only running anti-virus tools.
Dell this morning said it had added a WiMAX choice for three of its higher-end home notebooks. The Studio 15, Studio 17 and Studio XPS 16 will all have a $60 or less upgrade that offers 4G speeds on either the Clearwire or Sprint 4G networks in Atlanta, Baltimore and Portland. In peak conditions, this lets the portables connect at up to 13Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. Typical speeds are still faster than 3G with downloads between 2Mbps and 4Mbps.
Dell today extended its more exotic cooling options to the XPS 625 and XPS 630. The two now have the option of replacing their fan-based cooling with an Asetek liquid cooling system that reduces the noise of the system while simultaneously increasing the possibilities for overclocking the main processor. Choosing the option is deemed particularly useful for all of the XPS 625 line as well as custom-ordered versions of the 630, as both AMD's Black Edition chips and Intel's Core 2 Extreme are unlocked and allow easier speed boosts out of the factory.
Dell today at a press conference at CES revealed the Inspiron Mini 10 (not yet pictured), its third netbook. While only slightly larger than the Mini 9, the new portable is more advanced than either the smaller model or the Mini 12, including through its display. The namesake 10-inch screen is sharper than on other netbooks and produces a 720p (1280x720) resolution closer to full-size notebooks. The system also incorporates a multi-touch trackpad that not only helps with scrolling and zooming but also the ability to jump to a home screen or automatically scroll the contents of a page.
Dell today used CES to launch its first gaming desktop to use AMD processors in place of Intel's. The XPS 625 mid-tower shares the same custom-lit aluminum case as the XPS 630 but switches to an AMD 790FX-based mainboard and can be equipped with one of several overclockable Black Edition processors up to and including the 3GHz, quad-core Phenom II just introduced at the same time. All video card picks are equally AMD-based and scale up to dual Radeon HD 4850 cards in CrossFire mode.
Dell today held an early, low-key launch for its promised Studio XPS notebooks. The 13-inch Studio XPS 13 and 16-inch Studio XPS 16 are both treated as Dell's new upscale competition against the MacBook and come with a new black-and-silver trim as well as new, edge-to-edge display and a revamped keyboard unlike the company's other models.
Averatec's Korean home brand Trigem on Wednesday introduced the LLUON B2, the company's first large-sized all-in-one computer. In contrast to the earlier, Atom-based A1, the new model is targeted more closely at the high end occupied by the iMac or XPS One 24 and carries a 26-inch, 1920x1200 display in an upscale black design. The system uses its extra room to carry a 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad desktop processor versus the mobile chips of some challengers.
A product page for the XPS 1340 notebook PC on Dell's website hints at the upcoming release of the laptop, which could happen as early as this week. While the product page is incomplete, it does reveal the notebook will have a 64GB solid-state drive that will fit into the bay sized for traditional 2.5-inch hard disk drives. It's the same SSD as Dell uses in the XPS M1330 in overseas markets, and the XPS 1340 is likely to be an update of the XPS M1330 model.
Apple is waiting on a special round of Intel chips to update its iMacs with quad-core processors, according to claims by PC makers. The California company is reportedly hinging its move on a new set of desktop Core 2 Quad processors due in January that are specifically power-optimized for all-in-one desktops, dropping the thermal peak power from a too-high 95W down to 65W. They would have the same performance characteristics as existing processors and include a 2.33GHz Q8200 with 4MB of Level 2 cache, a 2.66GHz Q9400 with 6MB of cache and a 2.83GHz Q9550 with the full 12MB of cache.
Dell today quickly seized on Intel's Core i7 debut by launching two new systems, including one completely new line. The Studio XPS upgrades the regular Studio desktop with features friendly to gamers and high-end media with Core i7 processors and dedicated video as the baseline. They further exploit the new Intel hardware with three memory sticks that both up the minimum storage and also the available bandwidth.
Dell on Tuesday silently released the XPS 430, the latest incarnation of its mid-range media desktop. The new update to the glossy black tower system pushes it past 4GB of RAM for the first time and gives even the base XPS 430 a full 6GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 RAM (up from 800MHz DDR2) in stock trim. Also new are recent-generation Core 2 Quad processors at the baseline that trade some Level 2 cache for a faster 1,333MHz system bus.
Dell's plans to relaunch into MP3 players have been shelved in what may be a permanent cancellation, according to claims made by the Wall Street Journal late Sunday [subscription required]. Alleged sources say that at least one miniature player scheduled to launch alongside a media jukebox and sharing suite from Zing has been delayed past its original fall target while the software alone goes ahead. The unnamed device is currently postponed "indefinitely" and so may not be released at all, the reported insiders note.
Dell today upped the stakes for all-in-one PCs with the launch of the XPS One 24. The system ups the size of the PC to 24 inches and gives it a new, edge-to-edge 1080p (1920x1080) display with a 16:9 ratio that should make it ideal for watching Blu-ray movies at native resolution. The update also brings a major speed update with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Quad as well as the option of a GeForce 9600M GT for video that makes it a better fit as a gaming system or for heavy-duty HD video decoding.
A design decision from HP could lead much of the notebook business to making small 16:9 aspect ratio displays, according to alleged tips from manufacturers. The American PC builder is purportedly set to focus much of its energy on portables with 13- to 13.9-inch LCDs in the significantly wider proportions starting from the fall, pulling much of the industry with it by making the extra-wide displays common. The shift is said to be prompted by the lower price of making 13-inch screens versus 14-inch equivalents with the same ratio.
