7-Inch Tablet From Dell Available In Coming Weeks

The Wall Street Journal

Though the Texas-based manufacturer unveiled its Google Android-based, 5-inch Streak smartphone in May and billed it as a tablet, some of its new tablets will run Windows, and possibly Google's browser-based Chrome OS for lighter devices, Dell Greater China President Amit Midha told The Wall Street Journal. >.

Midha said Dell will launch "a whole slew" of new products in the next 6-12 months, including additional three-inch, four-inch and 10-inch devices.

"In fact, very much in the near future we'll be launching the seven-inch tablet as well as the additional three-inch product," Midha said in the The Wall Street Journal interview.

Dell CEO Michael Dell showed off a 7-inch tablet prototype at Oracle's OpenWorld conference last week in San Francisco.

Engadget reported in April that the new tablet will likely be called Looking Glass and will feature an 800x400 screen resolution and 1.3 megapixel camera. Looking Glass will run Android 2.1 with the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and 4GB of storage, according to Engadget.

The 7-inch Dell tablet follows a middle path between Apple's 9.7-inch iPad, whose success has spurred interest in the tablet market from a number of Apple's competitors, and the 5-inch Streak. A 3-inch device will likely come after this one, followed by 4-inch and 10-inch models due next year, according to the Wall Street Journal report.

Dell began selling a 3.5-inch Aero smartphone running on the Android platform in August to select markets, with a starting price of $99. The Dell Aero weighs 3.7 ounces, includes a 3.5-inch 640x360-pixel capacitive multi-touch display with pinch-to-zoom functions, and comes with a 5-megapixel camera with an 8x digital zoom.

With iPad sales forecasted to possibly reach $21 million next year, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, Apple's competitors in the PC space have a fair amount of ground to make up.