At Gizmodo, Brian Lam writes: "I bumped into Michael Dell at All Things D after his interview, and he was nice enough to show me this laptop that he was carrying that he said no one's seen before. It's a small form factor notebook, just like the Asus Eee and the HP 2133. He wouldn't tell me what OS it's running, or the pricing, but that it's a low-cost notebook meant for developing countries, and I hope here."
Gizmodo has pics where you can see much of the keyboard, but there are no images on the screen....
Dell has already said: "We absolutely plan on entering the market" (see InformationWeek).
The Dell minibook is most likely to be made by Compal Electronics, to have an 8.9 inch screen, and to use an Intel Atom processor.
Reasons? (1) Compal already makes notebooks for Dell, and (2) Dell has a good chance of getting early stocks of Atom chips because HP has not used Intel chips in its own 2133 minibook. (3) If Michael Dell has tried the Asus PC900 (reviewed in this week's Technology section), he'll know the 8.9 inch screen is very much nicer than the 7 inch screen. (4) It doesn't really make financial sense to fight Asus for the 7 inch market when there is very little profit in it.
We may know sooner than you think. If someone wants to pop along to the Compal stand (T0201A) at the Computex exhibition in Taipei next week (June 3-7), they can probably confirm it.
Update: Dell has now blogged the product, with a couple of pictures, but no new details.
