Dell Launching (iPhone Killer?) Smartphone Early Next Year

In an already interesting article chronicling the last 10 months of the second coming of Michael Dell at his namesake, Forbes mentions two more interesting upcoming products: A suicide chip for stolen laptops that remotely nukes the hard drive, and a smartphone co-produced with Quanta–led on Dell’s end by one of the RAZR’s daddies, Ron Garriques–that has “video, an MP3 player and Internet access and [will] be unleashed on the world early next year”.

It’s a little off the initial release projection–nowish–but Forbes’ tidbit indicates the rumoured project’s still alive and in the oven. Obviously, it remains mostly a blank slate of speculation–what’s the OS going to be? Still WinMo6 or will Dell mix it up? Will it have a touchscreen, QWERTY or both? The list goes on. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a certifiable test of the new design chops Michael Dell’s been pushing so hard, which we hope are up to the task since there’s nothing worse than a poorly designed smartphone. What do you think should go into a Dell smartphone? [Forbes]