Dell Mini 5 Tablet Demoed By Michael Dell Himself

The Dell Mini 5 made a brief appearance at the CES 2010 gadget extravaganza earlier this month and it looks like it is due to arrive much sooner than all of us expected. That is if Dell chief and founder Michael Dell’s word is to be seriously and I think we can do that. He looks like a man who has more self restraint than Microsoft’s current chief Steve Ballmer. Michael demoed the upcoming Dell Mini 5 tablet himself to the folks over at Techcrunch, who caught up with him in Davos, Switzerland. Mr. Dell is attending a attending the World Economic Forum there.

The video demo is basically a very short run through of the Android OS that is running on the device. The entire thing is less than a minute long and is just enough to show you that the thing performs smoothly and fits into your hand. I guess Dell took the ‘but it won’t fit into a pocket’ complaints against larger slate devices seriously.

It is running Dell’s own custom version of Google’s Android OS and Michael Dell says that is has 3G. So presumably it has WiFi has well. There is a 5MP camera behind it. I guess a camera behind the device makes sense because it is so small. One a side by side comparison, it is barely larger than the iPhone. Upon being asked the price, Michael simply repeated the fact that is coming in a couple of months.

PC Online managed to get their hands on one of the prototypes of the Dell Mini 5. It was apparently sold in the black market in China for 7500 RMB, which is equivalent to about $1096! Of course, that was because the prototype was never meant to go outside Dell labs. The actual price of this device will be much lower when it comes out. But if you think Mr. Dell said anything about price, you are mistaken. He didn’t even talk about what the specs.

But there was a tear down posted online on an Android forum by one of the owners of this device. That made certain of the fact that this is powered by the 1GHz Snapdragon processor made by Qualcomm. That has become the goto chip right now when you want to make something small yet powerful. No details on memory or storage but lets not expect too much. Dell has to be competitive and hence it can’t go overboard with this thing. Because unlike Apple, their main market is the mass market.

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