Dell has, at long last, announced its intentions to get into the smartphone market. The first handset will be the Mini 3, about which Dell is saying nothing other than that it will run on Android. If we know Dell, it likely won’t matter, as there is sure to be a deluge of handsets, all with slightly different specifications.
What we do know is that Dell isn’t messing around with some tiny market, here. The Mini 3 will launch in China and Brazil, where the partner companies have a lot of customers: China Mobile serves half a billion people, and the Brazilian telco Claro has 42 million customers. And this is just the start: Dell states that it is planning to take over the rest of the world, too.
It’s a smart move on the part of Dell. Some time in the future laptops will be like desktops are today: specialized tools for the minority. Everyone else will likely be using some kind of phone-like computer. And this is the angle that should have Microsoft worried: Those phones aren’t going to be running Windows, nor even Windows mobile. When a company the size of Dell gets behind the free Android, saving on all those OS license fees, you know something is up.
Press release [Dell]
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