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.
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Dell Mini 5 prototype impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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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.
