Dell hits with Thunder and Lightning smartphones

Asavin Wattanajantra

Details of a number of smartphone devices to be released by Dell have been leaked, showing that it is the latest PC maker aiming to take advantage of a lucrative market.

The website Engadget managed to get details of the Dell devices thanks to leaked documents. One of the highlights was the existence of a Windows Phone 7 ‘Lightning’ handset complete with a portrait slider and QWERTY keyboard.

It some impressive specs, including a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, WVGA 4.1-inch OLED display as well as a five megapixel autofocus camera, 1GB of flash with 512MB RAM plus 8GB of storage on a MicroSD card, GPS, accelerometer, compass, FM radio, and full Flash support including video playback.

It looks to ship at the end of the year as one of the Windows Phone 7 launch devices, with a 4G upgrade aimed for the end of next year.

Although that’s impressive, Dell looks to have focused more on Android with Thunder, Smoke and Flash devices. Thunder is almost identical to Lightning, but instead runs Android 2.1. The other two devices are more mainstream and will be cheaper with less features, but still look rather tasty.

Last but not least is the Dell Looking Glass tablet, a seven-inch tablet that is the bigger brother of the Streak 5. It will run Android 2.1 on a Tegra 2 processor.