Dell parks notebook in Carphone Warehouse
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Jumps directly into the channel Dellâs channel tyre-kicking stepped up a gear this week when it emerged that Carphone Warehouse is offering one of the vendorâs laptops as part of a broadband deal.â¦
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PC maker launches its first notebook with 17-inch display, more than two years after the first such laptop hit the market.
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Blog: New company, NVousPC, specializes in notebooks with personalized designs. But is there room for another enthusiast PC company?
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For manufacturing fanatics, a tour of Dell's facility is sort of like visiting Stonehenge. Here's where direct fulfillment took flight.
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Dell Inc. is launching a new line of notebook and desktop personal computers called ''Vostro'' that are aimed at small businesses with 25 or fewer employees.
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(InfoWorld) - Underlining its expansion from online to retail sales, Dell launched desktop and notebook PCs Tuesday at Macy's department store in New York. The company announced nine new Inspiron desktops and notebooks and an XPS M1330 notebook, all available in a choice of eight shell colors. "The Dell of today is vastly different from the Dell of six months ago or even last week," said Alex Gruzen, senior vice president of Dellâs consumer product group. "We're here at Macy's in New York City. That alone is different for Dell, being in a department store or any kind of retail setting at all." Dell even set up a portable kiosk to take orders for the new PCs in a temporary space it will occupy at Macy's for the next two weeks, he said. The new Inspiron notebooks cost $749 for the model 1521 to $999 for the model 1720, with a choice of processors from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices. The Inspiron 1420 comes with an additional choice of Microsoft's Windows Vista or the Ubuntu Linux operating system, for $799. The Inspiron desktops start at $349 for models 530, 530s, 531, and 531s, all supporting up to 500GB of disk space to store digital media files, with the model 530 offering a choice between Windows and Linux. The XPS M1330 notebook costs $1,299 with a 13.3-inch widescreen display, weighs under 4 pounds, and comes with a one-year subscription to Dell's Online Backup service, where users can store 10GB of files on Dell servers for remote data access. In an effort to bolster its sliding market share and quarterly profits,Â Dell began selling certain PC models at Wal-MartÂ retail stores on June 10, marking the first time it had strayed from the direct sales model. Dell rose to prominence by cutting its costs through eliminating retail middlemen and selling its PCs through only its Web site, phone lines, and catalogs. That system began to fail in 2006, as competitors cut costs and Hewlett-Packard passed Dell to become the world's largest PC vendor. Now Dell is in the midst of a corporate reorganization announced May 31 that includesÂ laying off 10 percent of its 88,100 workers. Dell hopes its new retail presence will allow it to fix a strategic mistake. By trying to beat its competitors through low prices in recent years, Dell found itself spending all its publicity efforts promoting its least exciting products, Gruzen said. Selling PCs in retail stores gives Dell an opportunity to showcase its premium PC models and bring new luster to its corporate image at the same time. "This is really just a hint of what we're doing to get these exciting new products into customers' hands," Gruzen said. "We have a broader retail strategy, and over the coming months, we will announce more partnerships, both with Wal-Mart and with other retailers." Also on Tuesday, Dell unveiled a new marketing tagline -- "yours is here" -- that shares many values with HP's "the computer is personal again" campaign. Both companies are increasing the number of options they give customers to personalize PCs and bundling tools that make it easier to handle personal tasksÂ such asÂ digital photos and music as well as business jobs. Dell emphasized those increased choices with its color options for each PC, including pink, yellow, green, red, and blue, as well as standard white and black. An increasing number of PC vendors will soon begin to follow that pattern, trying to differentiate themselves with flashy style and design instead of solely through technical detailsÂ such asÂ processing power, according to a report released this week by Forrester Research. "The consumer PC industry is entering the Age of Style, a time in which radical form factor innovations, increased aesthetic diversity, and consumer choice and personalization will determine which models, and which PC vendors, win or lose," Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder said in the report.
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The $399 ultraportable Cloudbook notebook PC just landed on retail shelves and is disappearing fast.
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(InfoWorld) - Dell reached for a larger share of the small business market Tuesday, launching the "Vostro" brand of notebook and desktop PCs designed to simplify tech support, an area that has attracted complaints and lawsuits for Dell in recent months. To make Vostro PCs easier to use, Dell will ship them without any "trialware," Dell's term for the unwanted software applications that many PC manufacturers load on new computers in the factory in exchange for payments from the software vendors. In June,Â Dell agreed to let customers opt out of those programs after customers complained about that "bloatware" on a company blog. In another step intended to make Vostro PCs easier to use, Dell streamlined the setup process. A customer without any IT experience can get a Vostro PC up and running in six minutes and can connect it to the company network in only six steps, CEO Michael Dell said at a press conference in New York. And to make tech support easier for companies with fewer than 25 employees, Dell will offer support services, such as dedicating 6,500 of its customer service workers to Vostro products, offering 24-hour access to online tech support, and providing 10GB of online data storage for a year. The new computers include the Vostro 200 desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo processors and a choice between Microsoft's Windows XP or Vista operating systems. Vostro notebooks include the Vostro 1000 with dual-core AMD chips and Vostro 1400, 1500, and 1700, offering screen sizes of 14.1 inches, 15.4 inches, or 17 inches respectively. Dell is selling the models starting at $449 for the notebooks and starting at $319 for the desktop. The company also plans to add a high-performance desktop model to the family in late August. Although Dell has lost much of its market share to Hewlett-Packard in recent quarters, the company is playing to its strength by focusing on small business users, said one analyst who attended the press conference. "They still have a lot of brand equity in the small business market, and they're extending that with this offer," said Merle Sandler, senior research analyst at IDC. "With the services, they become a trusted advisor, and hopefully down the road they can turn that into a revenue stream." Michael Dell acknowledged that point in remarks to reporters, saying, "Small business is a rapidly growing market. It's also a place where there is enormous demand and need for technology." At the same time, he said, "Our customers all tell us, 'Make it simple'." Still, the company faces a challenge in repairing its reputation relative to customer service. In May, New York state's attorney generalÂ filed a lawsuit charging that Dell had used fraud and false advertisingÂ to increase profits on PC sales, applying high credit rates to computer purchases despite a promise of cheap financing. Indeed, Michael Dell stumbled over several of the questions posed by a crowd of small business owners at the press conference. He smiled at one user's story about experiencing Dell customer service problems after experimenting with competing PCs from Sony and Toshiba, and he winced at another customer's plea for Dell to keep offering Windows XP because of the "horror stories" she had heard about Vista. He also grew defensive after a customer asked whether Dell would offer a hundred-dollar laptop such as the XO computer designed for developing countries by a team at MIT led by Nicholas Negroponte. Dell pointed out that MIT had recently raised its price to $170 and that a better way to get cheap PCs in the hands of schoolchildren would be to re-use the 125 million PCs discarded each year by users in western nations. "We've sold more PCs in the U.S. than anyone else ... but that doesn't mean we're going to walk away from our responsibility. Our team has made big investments not only on the product side but in service and support," Dell said.
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(InfoWorld) - Dell Inc. added Blu-ray disc capability to its notebook PC line on Monday, making an effort to compete withÂ Sony Corp.Â andÂ Toshiba Corp. in the growing market for mobile high-definition video platforms. In addition to showing high-end movies and games, Dell's XPS M1710 notebook could serve as a central node to support digital entertainment throughout the home, the company said. Customers can save 50G bytes of either data or video on a single Blu-ray disc. The ability to read and write data to the discs differentiates Blu-ray from HD-DVD, the competing standard for high-definition video, analysts said. Laptops with HD-DVD capability have lower prices but cannot save data to the discs, said Samir Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis Inc. "You are starting to see the different camps emerge within the computing companies, with Toshiba and Acer on the HD-DVD side and Sony and Dell on the Blu-ray side," he said. Sony's Vaio VGN-AR270 uses Blu-ray discs, while Acer Co. Ltd.'s notebook and Toshiba's Qosmio G35-AV650 use HD-DVD. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are improvements over standard DVD optical discs; they hold more data and let users watch high-definition video. All three techniques are optical discs, storing data in a binary form that is read by a scanning laser. But a Blu-ray disc can hold five times the capacity of a dual-layer DVD, Dell said. Movie studios and video game producers are eager to sell films on the new media, but the flow of new titles is only a trickle so far because content providers and hardware vendors can't decide which standard will prevail. Pricing starts at US$3,699 for the XPS M1710, including an Intel Corp. Core 2 Duo processor with 4G bytes of memory and up to 160G bytes of storage on a serial ATA hard drive.
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InfoWorld - Dell has signed a deal with a U.K. mobile phone retailer to distribute free laptops with the purchase of a broadband Internet access subscription, continuing the company&#39;s&#160;push into the retail market.
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Memory, all alone in the moonlight Forward-thinking Dell customers who want to make cash savings on pre-loaded memory cards in the firm's latest range of laptops could be in for a hard time.â¦
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Dell and PalmOne roll out their latest pure PDAs, and heap on the extras.
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PC vendor has started selling notebook PCs at popular retailer Best Buy.
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LED-backlit display and Blu-ray Disc drive too Hardware Widow Asus has formally announced its anticipated U1F 11.1in compact notebook, a luxury laptop run up in carbon fibre and magnesium-aluminium alloy, decorated with piano lacquer, and mounted with a made-to-measure leather palm rest. It even has a Blu-ray Disc drive.â¦
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Notebook a +9%, hardware +1,2%, in calo computer desktop
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Open source software for an extra Â£20 Pssst, pass it onâ¦ Dell is selling Linux-based home PCs and laptops to its UK customers, but youâll need a very good eye and probably a magnifying glass to find the systems on the direct seller's website.â¦
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Dell Inc.  said on Friday  it would sell notebook computers at more than 580 of Wal-Mart  Stores Inc.'s  Sam's Club outlets for $899 each starting  next week, its latest move to sell computers in retail chains.