failed tactics and vaporware

If you make a slew of products "hoping"one of them catches on, you've already failed at market analysis and clearly don't understand your customer base needs. Further, by releasing a half dozen products, you complicate what the devs are needing to code for, increase your own R&D costs, and manufacture fewer of each device, leaving a higher individual cost to make with higher software costs and less software selection. Complicate this by offering more than one OS and households looking for more than 1 form factor can't share apps and have vastly different user experiences.

Plus, with a true tablet (10"+) not coming out for 6+ months (lets call it 9 months), Apple only has that much more time to establish a stranglehold, and other products will also fail in the meantime leading analysts to proclaim Dells latest as nothing more than the next failed attempt.

I'm not the biggest apple fan, but I have to admit, the single OS, focused development, limited device variation, continued improvement in OS and hardware based on real market analysis and consumer feedback, high device build quality, cross platform support, shared app and content methodology (buy one ap, use it on up to 5 iOS devices on a single machine, and up to 5 machines on a single account) and a price point that no one else has yet matched? Anyone coming out with a similar performing (or better) device better plan on finding a price point more than $200 below the iPad or they will fail wen people honestly compare the whole package. Consumers in general don;t care about specs, they care about function, is it easy to use, can they find accessories, can they get support easily, and does it work with their existing other stuff (and their friend's stuff). Android has a big following, but its mostly limited to apple haterz ad the people Verizon and Sprint have literally shoved an Android device into the hands of that have no business (or want) to have it. Its complex, insecure, expensive, and fragmented. Feature for price, its a hard swallow unless it;s a lot cheaper. Phones are easy to choose from, and are not expected to do a lot, and a customer dissapoint can often be overcome with contract discounts. Tablets are a tough market since there's no recurring revenue stream. If a customer doesn't like the device, they return it. Dell is gonna loose tens of millions on this venture.

typo

" Dell is taking a scatter gun approach to mobile internet devices: offer lots of different screen sizes and a variety of operating systems to ensure as few potential buyers get left out as possible"

Should surely read:

"Dell is taking a scatter gun approach to mobile internet devices: offer lots of different screen sizes and a variety of operating systems to ensure as few potential buyers as possible"

The aggro updating the streak firmware, multiplied across multiple platforms? Surely a turn off of Archos proportions.

Any size any OS?

@Avatar of They, it's worse then that, I think they are probably talking some form of WinCE.

This approach would be interesting if you could get any size with any OS (before you say that's crazy, these probably all have ARMs in them and the hardware is probably quite similar other than screen size). Otherwise, though, I just see it being a bit of a mess... "Oh, you can't get *7 inch* with Android, only the 6 and the 9" and so on.