Dell to launch China-only Android-powered cell phone
It appears that Dell will finally be jumping in to the smartphone market, but it isn’t quite where every one expected them to do it.
It seems that Dell is finally going to dip its enormous big toe in the smarthphone pool, but for some unknown reason it has decided that China is the best place for them to do it.
Currently known as the Ophone mini3i, the new Dell phone is reported to be running Google’s Android operating system with a supposed 640 x 360 (which happens to be a 16:9 ratio) screen, and that’s it for the known and rumored specs of the device. There is one rumor floating around that it is a GSM band phone which would allow it to operate elsewhere in the world, but that seems a bit odd since the phone is said to be launching on China Mobile, the world’s largest cell carrier, which is currently in the middle of a big push for its own D-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) 3G network. If the phone is truly GSM, this would allow Dell to quickly distribute the phone to other parts of the world, but none of this is concrete information as of yet.
If all of this proves to be true, the Ophone portion of the name is part of a new initiative by China Mobile to create a whole new brand that will see multiple manufacturers all launching handset models under the same “Open Mobile System”, hence the name “Ophone”. Reportedly the second handset would be from Lenovo.
All of this is rumor and conjecture at this point, but there have been some blurry images of a handset with the Dell logo floating around for a while now, so it seems likely that all of this is true. Reports are that the phone may launch as early this week and it will be interesting to see how well the biggest computer manufacturer can do at launching a phone.
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August 17th, 2009
[...] broke last week that the firm was developing a phone, running the Android system, to be launched on the China [...]