Dell Planning to Release a Family of Tablets

Dell's first effort at a tablet is the still in beta Mini 5 which according to Michael Dell will ship "in a couple of months."

The Mini 5 capacitive touchscreen device will feature a 5-megapixel camera on the back, a separate front-facing camera that can be used for video conferencing, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor. It will run the latest version of Google's Android operating system at a 16:9 display ratio.


"It's a device optimized for media consumption," Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com. "It will offer the full web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop."

The Dell 5 Mini will also just be the first in a series. "We are going to have a family of tablets," says Choubey. "The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes."

That means future Dell tablets will compete more directly with the iPad.