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By Rob Garretson
Dell has launched its first U.S. smartphone, the Android-based Aero. The 3.5-inch touchscreen phone, which is available on the AT&T wireless network for $99.99 with a two-year contract, runs on old version of Google’s Android operating system and arrives less than two weeks after AT&T began offering Streak, Dell’s 5-inch tablet.
The 3.5-inch touchscreen phone sports a Dell-customized user interface and additions such as Microsoft Active Sync e-mail, handwriting recognition software and one-click upload of photos to social networks, plus preloaded apps like Facebook and Quick Office. The Aero also has a 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, a GPS receiver, 2GB of internal memory and a 2GB microSD card with support for cards as large as 32GB. Dell is touting the device as the lightest multi-touch 3.5-inch Android-based smartphone in the U.S., designed to deliver a “powerful, flexible, and entertaining experience.”
Currently, the phone can be ordered from Dell and is “coming soon” to AT&T online, according to Dell. Without the two-year commitment to AT&T, the Aero costs $299.99.
Like the Streak tablet, the Aero runs Dell’s customized version of Android based on the 1.6 release but will be upgradable to the current Android 2.2 version after Dell has completed its interface modifications, company officials said.
"The Dell Aero is built with a focus on style and performance,” said Ron Garriques, Dell’s president of communication solutions, “to help people find new ways to connect with friends and express themselves socially.”
The phone works on AT&T’s 3G cellular network and will have free access to AT&T’s Wi-Fi network with more than 20,000 U.S. hotspots.
The phone’s display features a 640 x 360 pixel resolution with pinch-to-zoom functionality. Its camera provides 8x zoom capability, flash, a dedicated camera key and built-in editing software.
The Aero and the recently released Streak are the first of a barrage of smartphones and tablets Dell reportedly plans to introduce in the U.S. this year. A Windows Phone 7 model, reportedly dubbed the Dell Lightning, with a 4.1-inch WVGA OLED display, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and a similarly equipped Android 2.X model called Dell Thunder, are expected for the holiday shopping season, along with another pair of Android phones -- dubbed the Smoke and the Flash -- and a tablet called the Dell Looking Glass, which said to sport a 7-inch WVGA 800-by-480-pixel display and Tegra 2 processor.
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