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Hey, you in the market for a cheap laptop with some crazy custom artwork glued to the lid? Dell’s got you covered — the Inspiron 15 has just been brought into the Design Studio fold, meaning you’ll be able to select graphics from a wide variety of artists when you spec out your system. Most artwork seems to be priced around $60, but we’re told that could vary — considering the base Inspy 15 is just $499, we’re assuming / hoping the ceiling won’t be much higher. Dell’s also launching a new FastTrack next-day delivery service for pre-configured machines — the company claims it’s constantly tracking orders and will be able to keep the most popular models on hand. Of course, that’s sort of the opposite of the whole “totally custom laptop” thing Dell’s pushing with Design Studio, but hey, sometimes you need a bog-standard PC, and you need it now.

Filed under: Laptops

Dell launches Design Studio for Inspiron 15, new FastTrack delivery service originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments — according to the latest Chrome OS update from Google, you’re looking at the company’s initial ragtag team of co-conspirators for its entry into the operating system business. With Adobe’s involvement, we can assume Flash support is a given, and the others unsurprisingly run the gamut of netbook and smartbook players. We can’t help but notice a couple of conspicuous absences on that list, including Intel and Dell. With Intel, you don’t need to partner to work on its chips, but we gotta imagine it’d help by offering more support, and as for Dell, we don’t know about that one, but there’s still plenty of time for the Big G to enlist more companies in the lead up to its second half 2010 debut.

Update: Google updated the list to include Toshiba.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Software

Google names Chrome OS compatriots, Dell noticeably absent originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not exactly all that uncommon for Dell to misprice an item on its website and, if you’re lucky, it might even honor it. But it looks like the stakes have just been raised considerably in Taiwan, where the company recently listed a 19-inch monitor for NT$500 (or about $15US) and promptly received more than 26,000 orders for close to 140,000 of the monitors. Now, ordinarily, Dell would simply send out a polite email explaining their mistake and call it a day, but Taiwanese regulators have now stepped in and ordered suggested that Dell honors the misprice after receiving a couple of hundred complaints. For its part, Dell simply says that it plans to “compensate the buyers for the mistake,” although it’s not clear if that means it’ll actually be sending out the monitors — which, incidentally, would add up to more than $20 million at their full list price.

Update: Engadget Chinese tells us that the Taiwanese government has suggested to Dell that it compensates consumers fairly and will assist in legal action against Dell if they don’t. Also, the $15 price applies only to the first monitor purchased with discounts applied to subsequent units for those who made multiple-monitor purchases.

Update 2: Dell has agreed to issue a NT$1000 (about $30) coupon for every monitor purchased including those made through multiple purchase orders. That sound more than reasonable to us.

[Via The Raw Feed]

Filed under: Displays

Taiwan ‘orders’ Dell to honor $15 monitor mishap (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell’s Mini 10 already offers GPS with an integrated 3G chip, but if you’re not interested in mobile broadband, starting next week you can opt instead for a wireless 700 location solution, a hybrid of Broadcom’s assisted GPS and Skyhook’s WiFi positioning technologies. We had a chance to sit down with a few of the product managers working on the device, and even within a brick-laden office building it did a pretty fine job of finding us within 30 meters and integrating with Flickr, Loopt, and Yelp using the Loki plug-in for Internet Explorer / FireFox. Impact on battery life was said to be “immaterial” although a ballpark estimate was about a five percent hit when in use. For $70, it’ll come bundled with CoPilot turn by turn navigation software. It requires the $30 HD display upgrade, but even then, an extra Benjamin total for a large-screen navigation device is hard to pass up if you’re looking to get a netbook anyway. If you’re still not sold, Dell promises it’ll be available for other Mini options, with and without the HD upgrade, in the near future. Now how about a few words on the Mini 11, eh Dell?

Filed under: GPS, Laptops

Dell’s Mini 10 getting GPS / WiFi tracking upgrade next week originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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