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Dell, Raymond Unveil 'One Smartwatch Per Child'; Icahn Erupts

Posted by Unknown on from the brought-to-you-by-the-open-sauce-foundation dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As Dell's (DELL:NASDAQ GS) board reviews three competing proposals for taking the company private, including a $24.4 billion deal led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the company has announced it is entering the suddenly crowded smartwatch sweepstakes along with Apple, Google, and Samsung. The twist is that Dell's product will target the low end of the market — the extreme low end, in the words of CEO Dell, because 'that's where most of the world's customers are'. Dell's smartwatch, projected to cost just 19.99 USD ($319.99 before Dell's mail-in rebate) will allow children in developing countries to communicate via voice and text, collaborate on school activities, and perform native-to-English voice and text translations with the help of Dell's new ARM supercomputer. Dell says premium models will also perform translations in the reverse direction, i.e. English-to-native. Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond, who joined Dell for the conference call, stated 'this is the beginning of what I call the Bazaar Wrist model of the mobile Internet. It'll be a battle of ideas against what I call the Office Tower Wrist model that Apple and Google will be selling.' Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who recently launched a rival bid for Dell, labeled the product an 'a pig in the poke' as well as a 'distraction and extreme waste of shareholder value', adding that his $7.44 Wal-Mart watch 'works just great for me and probably anyone else'."

8 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Guess I'm done with /. for today.

    1. Re:This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      Guess I'm done with /. for today.

      Slashdot's a news aggregator. The only news worth mentioning on April Fool's Day is going to skew heavily towards the foolish. It's one day a year. Deal with it.

      Anyone with real breaking news in the tech field already knows better than to announce it today. I, for one, welcome our foolish overlords; their absence was sorely missed in 2012, and it's good to have them back.

    2. Re:This is getting fucking old. by an+unsound+mind · · Score: 2

      At least omg ponies didn't get in the way of using the site.

      How to make your site entirely unusable for at least three days 101, from Slashdot. I'll be back in a week.

    3. Re:This is getting fucking old. by mister_playboy · · Score: 2

      Anyone with real breaking news in the tech field already knows better than to announce it today.

      The infamous Linux disabling PS3 update was released on April 1st... perhaps to get mileage out of the "nothing really happens today" attitude.

      --
      Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
  2. Re:Rebate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's that thing where you mail them sufficient proof of purchase and they mail you back saying you didn't send sufficient proof of purchase.

  3. Beating a dead horse by metalheadsunite · · Score: 2

    I thought I was bad at running a joke out too long. The humour on this ran out at about 8:30 this morning. A few stories of this would have been acceptable, not pages of it. It's like people posting all day on Facebook that they are pregnant; it's just not that funny.

  4. Goodbye slashdot by thomastheo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Goodbye Slashdot, Hello Arstechnica!

    1. Re:Goodbye slashdot by rmdingler · · Score: 2

      Dice Holdings' reports from the field indicate some early success from "Operation Cull the Priggish".

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway