A source with knowledge of the situation tells us that Dell is launching (or at least announcing) a mobile phone in China in the next day or two. We are trying to verify the information and gather more details on the hardware and operating system now.
Our sources on new hardware coming out of Asia tend to be spot on (we broke the news of the second and third generation Amazon Kindles, the launch of the Palm Pre and the existence of the second Palm WebOS phone and generally have good information on sales figures for iPhones, Kindles and other devices). But in this case the information we’ve received is extremely thin.
There have been reports of Dell launching a phone in the Chinese market in recent months, with rumors of the carrier partner being China Mobile in one case and China Unicom in another.
There is also wide speculation on the operating system, but we’re guessing it’s Android. Dell has also been working with Google on an Android-powered tablet computer in recent months. But in April Reuters had a report that Dell may be creating a proprietary operating system with China-based software maker Red Office.
What we’ve heard on the hardware: iPhone-like, touchscreen, no physical keyboard. that’s it for now. Keep an eye on the Dell China site.
Update:
We now get reports from China that China Mobile is about to release a Dell-branded Android phone called “Ophone mini3i” in the next days. More info over at MobileCrunch.
