Dell’s 5-inch Streak tablet may not be on a tear but the company is still moving forward with plans to introduce its second Android tablet.
Dell plans to launch a 7-inch tablet “in the next few weeks” and a 10-inch tablet within a year, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Dell’s founder and chief executive Michael Dell briefly showed the device at a Oracle conference last week but didn’t offer any details about the product.
Dell’s move to a larger screen tablet is in keeping with the company’s strategy of slowly but steadily introducing new handheld devices. In February, Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com that the Streak aka Dell 5 Mini would be the first in a series of devices.
“We are going to have a family of tablets,” Choubey said. “The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes.”
Since the introduction of the Apple iPad earlier this year, almost every major PC maker has announced that it is working on devices that can rival the iPad.
Just this month, Samsung, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and tablet startup Kno announced new products. Samsung showed a 7-inch tablet called Galaxy Tab that will be available on four major U.S. carriers –AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile in time for holiday season shopping.
Meanwhile, RIM has announced the BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7-inch tablet targeted at business users and consumers. The PlayBook is expected to be available early next year.
Tablet startup Kno is focusing on students with 14-inch single screen and dual-screen tablets that are expected to be available by the end of the year.
Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads so far.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has canceled its planned tablet ‘Courier’ while HP is trying to integrate the Palm webOS into its tablet products.
The 7-inch Dell tablet could make the company a real contender in the tablet space. With its 5-inch display, the Streak is more like a super-sized phone than a real tablet. Dell has also priced the Streak like a phone –offering the device for $300 with a two-year contract on AT&T.
So far, there’s no word on pricing for the 7-inch Dell tablet. But Dell will have plenty of competition to keep it real with its upcoming tablet.
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Photo: Dell Streak (Jon Snyder/Wired.com)
Not down with coughing up serious cash for a serious Galaxy Tab? Great news, Bargain Ben: you’ve got options. Joining the raft of cut-rate, low-priced tablets is a new one from Sylvania, which is humorously described as a “7-inch MID tablet.” Details are scarce, but it’s rocking Android 2.1, an 800 x 480 screen resolution, six-hour battery, 512MB of RAM, 2GB of Flash memory, front-facing camera and a microSD card slot. You’ll also get 802.11b/g WiFi, a pair of mini-USB sockets, HDMI output and what we’re assuming is a resistive touchpanel. We’d say the chances of Android Market access are slim to none, but for just $179.99, who really cares if it functions?
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