Dell to Get Into Cell Phones in 2006

prostoalex writes "BrightHand looks into the future of Dell Axim PDA line. X30 will be discontinued, X50 will get another update of Windows Mobile, and pretty soon Dell might be entering the cell phone business with PDA+phone Axim combo. The phone line will replaces the X50 model in mid-2006."

Comments

My phone can already do pda stuff

[Organized Konfusion]

The biggest use of a pda is to keep track of appointments, take notes, and hold contact information - all of which my nokia 6230 can do NOW! PDAs are dying.

Re:My phone can already do pda stuff

[dsginter]

PDAs are dying.

PDAs would have been dead a long time ago if the industry wasn't so greedy. For example, as you have illustrated, even the most basic of cell phones have had adequate PDA capabilities for years now. My Nokia 3588i certainly does. But I don't use it because Nokia wants to rape me to the tune of $50 for a data cable. Then I have to get proprietary software. So I don't use this functionality and never will.

If some bright spark in the industry realized that they could win most of the market over by simply offering a "non evil" policy on parts, accessories and service. For example, if someone adopted the USB standard for charging and data transfer, I wouldn't ever have to buy this shit over every time I bought a cell phone. I realize that the ultra high-end has already adopted this but there should be a friggin' law that requires all phones to adopt this policy.

But our government is run by big business so this will likely never happen.

Commodity phones, the end of innovation?

[squiggleslash]

While I understand Dell's decision to get into the cellphone business, it has to be said this marks the beginning of a potentially worrying trend. Dell is the biggest manufacturer of commodity PC hardware in the world, and cellphones are also going in that direction. While that might seem a good thing, remember that the commoditization of the PC industry essentially sucked the innovation from it. PCs have gotten faster, but for the most part, there hasn't been a surprise, a new way of doing things, in PCs and in personal computing, since the early nineties.

What we may be seeing is the start of essentially the phone clones. Imagine the offerings from most of the large manufacturers being essentially identical, perhaps three or four models, all looking broadly the same as their competitors equivalents, differing from competitors by battery life, probably running the same firmware. You might get the basic no-frills phone, similar to a Nokia 61xx series, a slightly more advanced colour phone with a camera, a PDA phone that's literally a pen-based PDA with GSM/UMTS built-in, and an expensive slimline phone. That's the future of phones, much as every PC manufacturer produces essentially low-end and high-end PC-clones, differing from competitors by case colour, and laptops.

From a technologists standpoint, it's also depressing. Phones remain a relatively closed platform, with only limited opening up in the form of the occasional J2ME implementation, usually badly implemented and slow, or Symbian/WinCE platform, both of which are designed to be as closed as the phone manufacturer chooses. The idea of being able to get independent development environments, independent convertors and compilers (on an off-topic note: why do we now call compilers "linkers" and use the word "compiler" to refer to code converters? That's just dumb. I used to think it was only tech-illiterates that used it that way around, but it's slipped into normal usage. People: It's a "C convertor", not a "C compiler". You can't get language compilers, compilers compile - Compile (tr.v): To put together or compose from materials gathered from several sources: compile an encyclopedia - object code to produce executables) so people can create new software for their phones and make them genuinely friendly to them is unlikely, and probably going to become less likely the more phones become commodities. In some ways that's ironic, as the opposite happened to personal computing, but in personal computing people were directly buying PCs rather than trying to get them from phone service companies.

Will this essentially be the end of the diversity we see from Nokia's 9xxx series to the Treo to all manner of other technologies? I hope not, but I fear Dell wouldn't be interested if the industry wasn't going in this direction. If it happens, expect Nokia and Sony Ericsson to become also-rans, or else shadows of their former selves, to the Nokias and SEs of today what HP was to the HP of old.

I guess, whatever else, time will tell.

Wow

[mattmentecky]

A company already entrenched in a saturated market (hardware/computer retailer), branching out into an even more saturated market (cell phones)? Sounds like a winning plan there.

Re:Wow

[swb]

You don't think that Dell has any experience dominating a saturated market through business efficiency, do you?

Re:Fantastic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good example, but your tech rep's English is too good.

Re:Great for Competition

[stecoop]

Your tickling one of my biggest gripes with cell phones today - carrier specific phones. Maybe one day the hardware will be powerful enough so that software will talk to whatever technology is used. A new technology arrives, great, get a software upgrade instead of new hardware. But this isn't specific to cell phones either - how many 802.11 technologies have you gone through?

That's not the problem.

[numbski]

The problem is that most cell phones aren't sold at what they're worth. They are sold at a loss, the price being subsidised by the major carriers. This is why the iPod phone between Apple and Motorola is being delayed. No one wants to subsidize it, becase the carriers are being greedy.

As I see it right now, Apple could sell a GPRS phone outright with no problems. Plug in a sim card and you're good to go. The problem is, most people aren't willing to shell out $600 for a phone. $300, maybe, but not $600.

Sprint ("The first to build our own, all digital network from the ground up.") and CDMA technology is stagnating, and to make matters worse, you can't use just any CDMA phone, you have to use one they've approved.

The main reason I'm looking to move to a GPRS carrier when my contract is up. I want a bluetooth phone that will nicely sync with iSync, and for extra credit I want either a native imap client (not a java one, that's what I use now) or native ssh. My Sony-Ericson, Sprint forsaken phone is buggy as all get out. I can't even answer a phone call while in hands-free mode. The call gets garbled. :(