The Web may be buzzing with stories about whether computer maker Dell should or shouldn’t get into the cell phone market, but the company itself  has tried to stay out of the public discussion. 
Michael Dell said on Friday that reports of Dell’s cell phone ambitions were “best described as a rumor” when chased by reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

The analysts had this to say about the computer maker doing battle with rivals such as Apple in the cut throad phone market as well as in computers. 

 Some were encouraging:

“This strategy makes a lot of sense. Smartphones are a big opportunity and in a way they’re canibalizing notebook and netbook sales to a degree,” said Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu. “It’s probably minor today but could become bigger over time as smartphones get more powerful. It’s better to go embrace the threat than doing nothing.”

He added, “They’re used to competition. It’s not easy. But against Apple and Research In Motion it’s going to be particularly difficult … What it boils down to is price and a decent brand name. Dell has a decent brand name.” he said.  “The risk is that its tough to differentiate. Apple and Rim in particular are very tough competition. Not even the Nokias, the Motorolas, LGs and Samsungs have figured out how to compete with them yet.” 

Others were skeptical Dell could succeed:   

“It’s doubtful that Dell ends up being anything more than noise in this market. it will probably end up being one of their forays that doesn’t amount to much,” said Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar. “Its highly unlikely they’ll get sponsorship from the major carriers. Its going to be a me too product … what is it they’re going to bring to the table? The only factor they can differentiate is on price.”

Reporting by Emma Thomasson and Nichola Groom in Davos

(Photo: Reuters)

The official start of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw PDA pioneer Palm unveiling its answer to the popular iPhone smartphone and a new, Web-oriented operating system. Investors pushed the stock up 30 percent for two consecutive days and bloggers affirmed their optimism in early hands-on reviews.

Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert admired the Palm Pre’s intuitive design and “beautiful” screen. And Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky found switching between applications graceful and simple.

Elsewhere in Vegas, Sony continued blazing the organic light-emitting diode trail showing off a bendable OLED video screen that would make it possible to literally wear what you want to display. Actor Tom Hanks demonstrated a pair of prototype Sony eyeglasses with built-in video screens for watching full-length movies.

Sony Ericsson offered up a clamshell-design music mobile phone for style-conscious consumers and a candy-bar shaped phone boasting Sony’s “Smile Shutter” technology, which is supposed to make taking pictures of people grinning easier.

Motorola lived up to the “green” theme of this year’s CES introducing its W233 “Renew” mobile phone, which it says is made partly from recycled water cooler bottle plastic and by purchasing carbon offsets to counter the energy needed to produce, use and dispose of the phone.

Samsung displayed a semi-transparent active matrix OLED screen and a mobile handset that does double-duty as a video projector.

And flash memory card maker SanDisk rolled out a family of fast solid-state hard drives (SSDs) designed to replace traditional hard drives in notebook PCs.

(Photos: Palm’s Pre phone, Tom Hanks wearing Sony’s movie-watching glasses, Motorola phone made of recycled water cooler bottles/ REUTERS)

If gadgets were fashion models, Samsung would probably send its TVs, Blu-ray players and camcorders sashaying down the runway, with reporters and photographers scrambling to get close. That’s how proud they were of their gadgets at the Consumer Electronics Show — admittedly, they were all slim, sexy and worth a slip of drool.

The South Korean electronics giant paraded a number of new or upgraded TV models in Las Vegas today, including a line-up of high-definition TVs that are supposed to be more energy efficient because they use LED as a light source rather than traditional cathode lamps.

Jongwoo Park, Samsung’s president of digital media, was quite bullish when asked about the tiny LED TV market. “We’re going to create the market,” he said.

Since these TVs use less energy and contain no mercury, Samsung’s hoping the growing body of green consumers will be tempted to buy thems. No price points yet, though.

Samsung also showed off a new Blu-ray player, billed the world’s slimmest at only 1.5 inches thick. In fact, Samsung executive Tim Baxter said these gadgets are meant to be “show offs.”

But who’s buying these days? “Even in these tough times, people will invest in their family,” Baxter said. And if you’re not buying, you could always get close.

Apple’s ghost was hovering over the feast of gadgetry at IFA, the world’s largest consumer electronics fair in Berlin. Unlike most of its competitors, Apple itself didn’t have a stand - its still very much alive chief executive Steve Jobs doesn’t like to share the limelight with others.But Apple was the benchmark against which many of the journalists and trade buyers present assessed rival wares. Two products were touted as Apple killers, though neither quite makes it.

The one that comes closer is iRiver’s SPINN media player, which is a similar size to Apple’s iPod Touch but 40% lighter and has a touchscreen with superior OLED technology, which makes it ideal for watching video. The SPINN’s angular metal case contrasts with the more rounded Touch and is named after an knob built into its top right corner that allows users to easily flick through photos and music.

Buyers in the market for a dedicated music and video player may overlook the SPINN’s lack of wifi to connect to the internet, which the Touch has, but the SPINN’s Achilles’ heel is its meagre 8 gigabytes of memory. This is enough for thousands of songs but only three or four films. The top-of-the-range Touch has four times the capacity.

The other product viewed as a challenger to Apple was Samsung’s ultraportable X360 laptop which faces up to the Macbook Air as well as Lenovo’s X300. Like the Air but unlike the fractionally heavier X300, Samsung’s X360 eschews a DVD drive and weighs just 1.27 kg - even less than the Air.

The X360 can store more files than the Air, which came out in February, and connects more easily to a wider range of devices. Unfortunately in a market segment where looks matter, the X360’s shiny black plastic comes across as brash and, well, plasticky compared to the Air’s stylish tapered aluminium and the Lenovo X300’s discreet matt black casing.

Samsung’s display model was also covered in a generous layer of finger grease by lunchtime on Friday - testament for sure to visitors’ eagerness to paw the laptop but a warning to prospective buyers that they’ll need to back some wet-wipes when they travel.

The genuinely gorgeous and the jaw-droppingly gimmicky are rare sights on the floors of TVs and tumble dryers on show in in Berlin at IFA, which claims to be the world’s largest consumer electronics fair, but this year Sony takes the dubious accolade of having both on show within a few metres of each other.

First the sublime: Sony’s XEL-1 TV, based on OLED technology, will go on sale in Europe for the Christmas season for around 3,000 euros after being available in Japan for almost a year. With just an 11 inch diagonal, you don’t get much screen size for your money, but you do get a TV that’s just three millimetres thick and has strikingly more vivid picture than conventional LCD technology.

Of course, Sony isn’t going to be alone with OLED televisions for long. Samsung also has an impressive array to go on sale next year, though theirs will be pricy too — product executive Noh Young Joong told Reuters they would likely cost two to three times as much as equivalent-sized LCD units.

Turn round the corner at Sony’s stand, though, and things rapidly go downhill. Remember those artificial flowers from the 1980s, which gyrated around when you played music? Possibly not, but their spirit lives on and seems to  have possessed ‘Rolly‘. Rolly is egg-shaped, about the size of a hand grenade and plays tinny music. It rolls around (dances even) and flips lids covering its speakers. You can stream music from your mobile phone via a Bluetooth wireless network, or store several hundred songs on board. If you have time on your hands, you can even program its dance moves using a laptop.

You may be wondering what the point of it is, though seemingly not the design experts who gave it a prestigious Red Dot award. Rolly goes on sale for 350 euros in October:  roughly the cost of one of Sony’s Playstation 3 video games consoles.

A more deserving winner of a design award — and one that stays the right side of gimmicky — is an MP3 player from Korea’s iRiver that offers a minimalist, and miniature, take on Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s features are reduced to two small pastel-coloured spheres for ears and a larger one for the face. The ears act as a volume control and a track skip control respectively; the face has a socket for headphones and a discreet Disney logo. The price is right too, at around 40 euros when it goes on sale in Europe later this year.

While all eyes are on Steve Jobs’s presentation at Apple’s developers conference, rivals to the iPhone want you to know that they are not afraid to shout during a hurricane — in hopes that someone hears their thunder.

At least that’s what we suppose is the reason Samsung and Nokia both have news today, about one year after the original iPhone was introduced.

While Apple’s CEO was unveiling a new “more affordable” iPhone with 3G network support and integrated GPS support, Korea’s Samsung launched a new touchscreen smartphone called Omnia that aims to make Internet browsing easy. It has a wide screen for viewing video as well as music capabilities and a 5 megapixel camera, and runs on Microsoft Windows Mobile software.

Also, Nokia is set to start selling top-of-the-range N96 multimedia device, and expects Apple’s new iPhone to boosting sales of multimedia handsets in general.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile will sell the new iPhone exclusively in Germany and the Netherlands, according to Reuters sources.

(Photo: Reuters)