A marketing email this morning reminded me that I had meant to talk a little about the fact that Dell is finally manufacturing (or at least putting their name on) a Tablet PC. It's a Tablet version of their mid-range Latitude laptop - the Latitude XT. (The order of Dell's laptops is (low-end) Vostro, Latitude, Precision, XPS (extreme performance). It looks like they targeted the Lenovo Thinkpad tablets with most of their specs.

I haven't found any side by side comparison, but since I don't have the Dell (though I do have the Lenovo) I'll use their online specs to compare the options. (Lenovo's spec sheet, Dell's spec sheet)

So, while they look comparable, it is possible to create a much higher-end rig with the Lenovo than you can with the Dell. The Dell's "entry" configuration is already $1000 more and a lot whimpier than Lenovo's.

I know that one of the big problems with Tablets early on was that there were not enough low-priced entry level machines for the average user who does not need a lot of performance. There are now a number of options in that range, but at $2500, Dell isn't going to even touch that market. And I think that people looking for more performance will get more bang for their buck with the Lenovo. One downside I find with my Lenovo is the limited resolution - I have the multi touch so I get 1024x768 max which is a real drag when I'm using Visual Studio because I don't have a lot of screen real estate to leverage. It's even more of a problem when I'm doing conference presentations and demoing in Visual Studio. I could have opted out of the multi-touch and gone for the 1400x1050, but I really like the multi-touch. Of all of the tablets I have had, the Toshiba was always the hands down winner when it came to screen resolution. So Dell does have that advantage of having the multi-touch with a decent 1280x800.