Dell enters smartphone market
ft.com
By Joseph Menn in San Francisco
Published: November 13 2009 23:33
Dell confirmed on Friday it was entering the smartphone market. It will manufacture the devices for distribution through carriers worldwide, beginning with Brazil and a previously announced alliance with China Mobile.
The phones will use Google’s Android operating system, a rebuff to Microsoft’s mobile efforts from one of the software giant’s most important customers. Dell is the second-largest maker of personal computers.
While Dell is a late entrant to the crowded Android marketplace, the company portrayed it as an extension of its booming business selling inexpensive, Web-connected notebook computers through telecommunications carriers including China Mobile.
Those netbooks run versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system and lead the market in that category at retail stores in China, Dell said. The company pointed out that it has similar distribution deals with Vodafone in Europe and with AT&T and Verizon in the US.
Dell’s “Mini 3” phones will have touch-screens, though other details were withheld pending the phones’ release later this year.
Dell noted the flexibility of Android, which is free to use and has a publicly available programming code allowing for easy modificaton.
“That’s very lucrative for carriers as they try to customise services and applications,” said Dell spokesman Matthew Parretta. He said that the phones rollout was part of a “global strategy” but wouldn’t say what other countries might get versions of the phones, or when the expansion would come.
In Brazil, the 3G- phones will be sold by Claro, which has 42m customers, and run on the 3G network. China Mobile, which said in August that some Dell phones would use its Android-based OPhone platform, serves 500m subscribers and is the world’s biggest carrier. It hasn’t said whether the Dell phones will use 3G or the older 2G network for connectivity.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. |
