Open floodgates
The corporate plumbers don't seem to be doing a very good job this week. First tech site Gizmodo gets hold of the next iPhone way before it's due to be announced, now rival site Engadget seems to have landed a PowerPoint presentation with the details of a suite of Dell mobile devices due to be launched later this year and early next year.
The most noteworthy of them is called the Lightning (pictured below), which is not only a Windows Phone 7 device, but has gone for an innovative portrait slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It has a massive 4.1 inch screen and, as stipulated by Microsoft, a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC.
The other devices leaked are as follows: the Thunder is an Android 2.1 device with Dell's own ‘Stage' UI on top of it and a 4.1 inch screen, but no hard keyboard. The Smoke has a portrait QWERTY, but it's not slide-out. It also runs Android 2.2 - codenamed Froyo. The Flash also runs Froyo and seems to be aimed at the fashion-conscious consumer.
Engadget had already got hold of some info implying Dell was going to add to its planned tablet/slate range with seven and ten inch varieties called Streak, but the seven-inch one now seems to be called Looking Glass, will contain Tegra 2, and run Android 2.1 - as will the five inch Streak.
You can see all the stories from this mega-leak here. One or two sites have already asked whether getting so much info in one go is suspiciously convenient, but until proven otherwise we will assume it's legitimate. It looks like, by the end of the year, competition in the mobile device market will furious.
