Dell, Late To The Tablet Party, Hopes To Gain

Dell Computer (NASDAQ: DELL) has been a troubled company ever since founder Michael Dell returned as CEO. The company has fallen behind rivals in PC and server sales. Other large tech firms including IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have seen their earnings and prospects surge.

Dell is no longer the largest PC company in the world, having passed that privilege to HP. Asian manufacturers like Lenovo and Acer are gaining rapidly on the US company.Amidst all of this Dell has launched a tablet PC. It is not clear from the product specifications and pricing whether it is meant to compete with the Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle, the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad, or both. Therein lies the trouble, along with the fact that it is late to market.

The Streak Tablet will go on sale August 12. It will be sold tethered to an AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) two-year subscriber plan for a price of $299.99. It can also be bought independently for $549.99. The machine will have a tiny screen of 5″ and will be powered by the Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android operating system, which has become immensely popular among smartphone manufacturers.

The machine in underpowered. It will use a Qualcomm’s Snapdragon solution with integrated 1GHz processor. That makes it less of a PC than the Apple tablet or most mini-PCs. That leaves the Dell product stuck in a space between smartphones and personal computers–a segment of the market that is untried, perhaps because market research shows that products for that part of the market are not likely to be popular.

Dell has not gotten much right in the last three years, and it seems to have extended that streak.

Douglas A. McIntyre