It appears that another portable computer system manufacturer is planning to take a shot at the Eee PC market. Dell is apparently working on, if not finalizing, a notebook computer that is small enough to be considered a competitor for Asus' Eee PC, MSI's Wind or HP's 2133 portable computers. Unfortunately, at this moment there's a strong uncertainty about the release of what seems to be a mini Inspiron laptop.

News about the new computing device surfaced on the web after a journalist managed to get some photos of a red candy laptop that Michael Dell was carrying at Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference. We can't say for certain if this is just another marketing strategy for a product that is about to be released, but it appears Dell is confirming the product in a post on one of its blogs.

Michael Dell described the small notebook as the perfect device for the next billion internet users. But this is as much as Dell's CEO would let us know. No word on any technical specifications, prices, availability or anything else that will make us belief we'll be seeing the notebook on the market. All we have is speculations and a couple of photos, from Dell's "Your Blog" page.

From what we can see in the photos, the notebook is rather small, has at least two Audio jacks for microphone and headphones, three USB ports, a card reader, an Ethernet RJ-45 port and a VGA port. The notebook also seems to provide a full-sized keyboard.

The journalist wasn't able to turn on the notebook and see what operating system it was running. One can only speculate about its computing power and if it is going to feature Intel's Atom processor.