Dell may be branching out with exciting new products like the Mini 5, but it still has to keep its base of business users well stocked with nondescript desktops, and it now has a new pair for them in the form of the OptiPlex 980 and FX100 Zero Client. The latter of those is a barebones remote desktop that was previously only offered when bought with Dell’s Precision R5400 rack workstation, but it’s now available on its own and boasts some added support for VMware View 4.0 with PCoIP for a bit more flexibility. The OptiPlex 980, on the other hand, is a traditional desktop, and is available with Core i5 or i7 processors, optional SSD drives, an optional Dell EcoKit that promises to cut noise by 50%, and your choice of three different chassis options (minitower, desktop or small form factor). Look for it to be available in the “coming weeks,” with prices starting at $807.
Well looky here: an unannounced Studio Touch laptop making its debut on page 5 of Dell’s on-line catalog. The Studio 1558 Touch is flanked by the multitouch Studio 17 Touch. You won’t find any details about the 1558 on Dell’s website or retail channels so what you see above is what you get: Core i5 processor underpinning a Windows 7 Home Premium OS and 320GB hard disk for a $999 starting price. Expect this one to get official soon enough.
pimg src=”http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/500x_500x_palmappre.jpg” class=”left image500″ width=”500″ /When Palm issued a release announcing lowered guidance and sales expectations for this year, a class=”autolink” title=”Click here to read more posts tagged #jonrubinstein” href=”http://gizmodo.com/tag/jonrubinstein/”Jon Rubinstein/a didn’t even try to cushion it, admitting, “driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than [he] anticipated.” OK. Now what? strongUPDATED/strong/ppThe implication of “longer than expected” is that success will come if everyone emjust waits long enough/em. But to say something like that in February of 2010, over seven months after the Pre launch, three after the Pixi launch, and weeks after a a href=”http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100212/is-verizon-deal-enough-to-turn-palm-around/?mod=ATD_rss”by all counts/a anemic launch for their barely differentiated Verizon counterparts is to tacitly admit that there’s a emserious problem/em. If Palm’s current lineup doesn’t have momentum now, it never willmdash;and their investors a href=”http://www.google.com/finance?client=obq=NASDAQ:PALM”know it./a/p
pFor Palm, this leaves two options: either build a new productmdash;something they may not be able or positioned to domdash;and hope it’s a wild success; or sell out. So who’s buying? a href=”http://www.businessinsider.com/palm-slashes-guidance-2010-2″BusinessInsider/a throws the regular suspects on the tablemdash;RIM, Nokia, Dell, HPmdash;but they seem chosen because they’d be eminteresting/em buyers, not because they’ve shown any real interest. Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if Nokia or BlackBerry absorbed webOS, so they could both have truly modern, user-friendly smartphone operating systems? Yeah it would! Someone should tell them./p
pThis leaves Palm with nothing to do but wait: to a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5392799/how-palm-lost-like-apple-in-the-80s”die/a; or to be saved by a hero it hasn’t even glimpsed yet, and that probably doesn’t exist./p
pstrongUPDATE/strong: Here’s Rubinstein’s a href=”http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/02/25/palm-ceo%E2%80%99s-letter-to-employees/”memo/a to Palm employees re: their lowered guidance for the year. It’s far from defeatist, but even further from reassuring:/p
blockquote
pTeam,/p
pThis morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March./p
pI realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales./p
pDave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. strongTo accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations-all getting the word out about Palm.br/strongbr
All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience./p
pOur goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done./p
pWe’ll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions./p
pGo team!!!/p
pjon/p
/blockquote
p200 brand ambassadors and emmaybe/em some local advertising? That’s more worrying than if Rubinstein had said nothing at all. [a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/palm-slashes-guidance-2010-2"BusinessInsider/a]/pbr clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
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We’ve been itching to get our hands on the Alienware M11x ever since we first saw it at CES — it’s one of the most interesting riffs on the thin-and-light we’ve seen in a long time. Sure, it’s compact, but inside it’s got a ULV Core 2 Duo paired with a switchable NVIDIA GT335M GPU, making it one of the most powerful small laptops on the market. But power never comes cheap: the M11x starts at $799, and our tester model equipped with an upgraded 1.3GHz SU7300 Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM clocks in at $949. That’s pricey, but potentially worth it if you’re a serious gamer on the go. You know we had to test one and find out — let’s see if the M11x can back up those looks with performance.
Special thanks to our new favorite reader Joe Kelly, who loaned us his M11x for this review!
The 23.6-inch Acer GD235HZ ($399) and Alienware OptX AW2310 ($499) represent the latest gen 3DHD monitors. So which is the better buy for 3D gaming? Tom’s Guide actually likes them both quite a bit.
In their epic review of these 120Hz displays, Tom’s gives Acer points for excellent contrast while praising the Alienware for superior color. Both seem equal in terms of actual 3D (and much improved from the previous generation of 3D LCDs), which makes sense given that two monitors with equal refresh rates and resolution are being driven by identical graphics cards and looked at with identical NVIDIA shutter glasses.
For Tom’s, it comes down to amenities, which they feel Alienware nails with extra ports, a nicer build and a swiveling display. I personally just dig that orange finish. Since the OptX AW2310 is on sale for $450 at the time of this post, it certainly sounds worth the $50 premium, should you want to enter that whole 3D glasses lifestyle. [Tom's Guide]
Wow, some nice gadget fairy has just made our wish come true! Soon after our Dell Mini 5 impressions post went live, eagle-eyed reader unclepain reported that the phone’s docking station has made a quiet appearance in T3 Greek Edition’s bizarre hands-on video (seriously, we get the “DELLICIOUS” joke, but does that poor bloke really have to stand like that throughout the video?). According to the tiny bit of English we heard, the dock will have HDMI output and a USB port (for connecting to the computer, we presume) on the back. You can also see the short transparent back support when the presenter undocks the phone. Now, bundle this with Mini 5 or throw it à la carte at a reasonable price and we’re sold. Eccentric footage after the break.
Dell’s puzzled the world for quite some time with its outlandish Mini 5 — at first glance it’s just another Android-based MID, but a quick fiddle with it reveals the full-fledged 3G phone inside. So will it fit in a pocket? Can we carry it around like a normal phone? Is this the future form factor that will bring the ultimate balance between portability and practicality? With such heavy dose of curiosity, we eventually traveled all the way to Shenzhen literally just to grab this prototype. Now, before you read on, do bear in mind that some of its features — especially the OS — may not make it to the final design when it comes out later this year, nor do we know what stage this prototype was at. We good? OK.
Let’s start with the basics: the main specs on our unit include Android 1.6 (which will definitely be obsolete for the final product), five-inch 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, Snapdragon QSD8250 chipset (with CPU clocked at 1GHz), Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and WCDMA radio. Sadly, we have no info on whether the Mini 5 will have other cellular radio options, but it wouldn’t hurt to send Dell a petition regarding this matter. For those who want the dimensions and weight in numbers, it’s about 152mm x 78mm x 10mm at 8 ounces (including the battery, which lasts for almost a day for normal usage on 3G). Memory-wise there’s 405MB RAM and 1.63GB of internal storage — a slight let-down for the latter, so let’s hope the retail unit will be given a more generous dose of silicon. You can add a microSD card next to the battery on the back, but it appears that the mysterious second card slot we saw in the earlier teardown only gave us false hope — we couldn’t find a way to get to it without prying open the housing. Connection to your computer relies on a proprietary port — similar but slightly larger than the iPod’s — to USB cable, which may suggest that we will see some more peripherals made for the Mini 5 and its future siblings.
What we’d normally brush off as pretty standard mainstream tech piece became comedy gold thanks to the acerbic wit of Dell’s John Thode. The VP of mobile devices was discussing its companies entry into the tablet industry (all the while promoting the Mini 5, of course) and seemed to downplay Apple’s iPad momentum.
“It’s really hard to kind of do the same thing over again twice or three times… [Apple] is going to have more competition here.” A rational statement, but here’s where it gets interesting: “If anybody tells you they know exactly what’s going to happen here, they’re either Apple, or they’re smoking dope.” Don’t tell John, but we hear Gartner just hired the entire cast and crew of Dazed and Confused for a special analytics department.
Even if you hate Apple, you can’t deny they set the tone. The WSJ reports that while HP announced their Slate first, they waited for the iPad unveil to make changes, like the price—which they plan to undercut.
HP wants to come in under $630 for their full Windows 7 Slate. A tall order, considering that even Asus and MSI, skilled as they are in the art of undercutting, furrowed their collective brows at the iPad’s cheaper-than-expected pricing.
And apparently Acer’s already backtracking on their promise not to make iPad competitors, with Sumit Agnihotry, a marketing veep at Acer telling the WSJ that working on stuff in between a phone and laptop, and that “Acer plans to introduce possibly more iPad-like devices.” Then there’s Dell, who found via consumer research what they really want is a five-inch slate for browsing. So voila. Let’s not forget JooJoo or Lenovo, either. And Super Kindle!
Over the last several months, Wired has been reimagined with depth and motion for tablets in a new digital product called Wired Reader. Here’s a demo of the experience, and it’s a definite feast for the eyes/fingertips.
Teaming with Adobe, Wired built this new rendition of their magazine (due this summer) through Air, which offers compatibility to both Android and Apple mobile platforms as well as Macs and PCs.
Well, sort of.
The catch, of course, is that while Wired Reader can be packaged into its own Air runtime app to load on the iPad, Apple doesn’t have to allow it (for reasons of security, stability or, well, whatever grumpy reasoning Apple comes up with). Also, the demo you see here is seamlessly smooth, and this fluidity is a huge flavor component to this visual candy. Whether or not the content will be so jitter-less on either the iPad or any stock Android tablet is still an unknown (especially as some iPad animations tended to stutter during our hands on, without any Air go-between).
Those caveats aside, I do think Wired Reader looks fairly exciting. So which magazine do you prefer, the paper version or the tablet version? [Wired via Business Insider]
Dell may be branching out with exciting new products like the Mini 5, but it still has to keep its base of business users well stocked with nondescript desktops, and it now has a new pair for them in the form of the OptiPlex 980 and FX100 Zero Client. The latter of those is a barebones remote desktop that was previously only offered when bought with Dell’s Precision R5400 rack workstation, but it’s now available on its own and boasts some added support for VMware View 4.0 with PCoIP for a bit more flexibility. The OptiPlex 980, on the other hand, is a traditional desktop, and is available with Core i5 or i7 processors, optional SSD drives, an optional Dell EcoKit that promises to cut noise by 50%, and your choice of three different chassis options (minitower, desktop or small form factor). Look for it to be available in the “coming weeks,” with prices starting at $807.
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Over the last several months, Wired has been reimagined with depth and motion for tablets in a new digital product called 
