Dell Goes After Apple's iPad, Plans Tablet Family

Hardware makers most likely see the iPad's lack of Flash as an advantage in their quest to bring out products capable of offering the device a strong competition on the tablet market. Of course, Apple has the strength of its brand and the large content availability that definitely provides its products with functionality. Still, other players, such as Dell, are eager to enter the fray. The PC maker's Dell Mini 5 tablet was recently handled on video and the company was more recently revealed to be planning an entire family of slate devices.

In a recent interview, the General Manager of Dell's tablet division, Neeraj Choubey, explained the functionality and purpose of the company's tablet as well as its future plans. The Dell Mini 5 is described as a handheld device that offers the full functionality of a smartphone while also including laptop features. Choubey also states that the hardware maker is planning an entire tablet family aimed at competing with the iPad. This means that Dell might be planning Mini 5 models with larger screens at a price point of $500-$830.

"It's a device optimized for media consumption," Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com. "It will offer the full Web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop."

"We are going to have a family of tablets," he added. "The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes."

As far as content availability is concerned, the company is supposedly already working with carriers for low-cost data package plans. This strategy is similar to what Apple negotiated. Dell also plans to offer a range of cloud-based services aimed to give users better access to data.

"At a very basic level, you would have a service that will share content across the devices seamlessly and have it in the cloud," said Choubey.