Dell Sells Convertible Tablet for $599, Microsoft Lists It at $399

It would seem that a paradox of sorts has appeared on the web, one involving a certain tablet/netbook hybrid and two web stores, one belonging to said device's maker and the other one to the world-renowned developer of the Windows OS.

As end-users know, the past year has seen the fairly rapid rise of the media tablet market, many models using the ARM-Android hardware-software combination.

This has left netbooks with less of a sales growth rate than before, to the point where they actually started to get cheaper, their makers' having to make a clear price difference between the two from factors.

Then again, there are those products that quite literally merge the two concepts together, leading to so-called hybrid devices, convertible tablets as it were.

Dell, some time ago, developed one that, instead of a screen with tilt and swivel, had a less common mechanism for switching between the laptops and tablet form factors.

For those that need a reminder, the Inspiron Duo is a machine that uses the Intel Atom N550 dual-core mobile processor, which has a clock speed of 1.5 GHz.

The 10.1-inch display has a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels, meaning that it can easily display HD videos in their full quality (a Broadcom Crystal HD chip does the playback), although the small size will make the experience less entrancing that a HDTV would.

Dell currently has the Inspiron Duo selling for $550, but, oddly enough, the Microsoft Store actually has it listed for $399.

In other words, Microsoft is selling the mobile solution at a price point that is 27% lower than what its maker asks for it.

Granted, this may just be a limited time offer or some such thing, but it is still noteworthy that the tag is so much lower than it was before.

For those that want some specs, the convertible tablet has 2 GB of RAM, a 320 GB HDD, LAN, WiFi, a 1.3 megapixel webcam and the GMA 3150 integrated graphics (handles the basic things, leaving only the video playing to the aforementioned Broadcom processor).