Dell Officially Quits Smartphone Business

Recently, Dell officially confirmed that it stops making new smartphones. One of Dell’s top executive, Jeff Clarke, said that smartphone business requires much more focused effort and investments. The giant e-tailer, Amazon, manages to sell tablets at break-even price, but still makes sizable profits by selling cloud storage service and content. Dell has no resources to become a fully established smartphone maker and it couldn’t find ways to imitate Amazon’s business model.

Dell has a slightly better luck with tablets and its 5” Dell Streak was moderately popular until its termination in summer 2011. Dell’s performance in mobile industry was somewhat tarnished by Michael Dell’s opinion toward Android. In 2011, the company founder accused Google’s open source platform for being not well-developed enough, which contributes to Dell’s failure.

The company remains working on PCs and Windows-based tablets. The company recently released numerous tablet models, including Latitude 10, XPS 10 and XPS 12, all running Windows RT or Windows 8. These slates should provide much better integration with Dell’s Windows 8 laptops and desktops than any Android device.