Dell Unveils Lightning, New Windows 7 Portrait Slider

Posted 04/21/2010 at 5:28pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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It looks like Dell is really taking the smartphone space seriously, with news that they are working on a Windows Phone 7 device called the Lightning. The phone looks to be the rarely seen portrait QWERTY slider form factor. With most Phone 7 devices we've seen looking like pretty similar landscape sliders, this is a breath of fresh air. The image is only a render, but the design looks very elegant. The specs are also looking good.

The Lightning is expected to have a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 4.1-inch WVGA OLED touchscreen, a 5MP autofocus camera, and support for both AT&T and T-Mobile 3G bands. Dell is also including an FM radio function and the usual Wi-Fi, GPS, and accelerometer support. There will be 1GB of flash memory built in, with an additional 8GB MicroSD card. Oddly, the documents leaked to Engadget seem to indicate the SD card is not user-accessible.  Dell also indicated there would be full support for Adobe Flash; we're interested to see what Adobe has to say about that.

Expected launch will be sometime in Q4 of this year. No carrier partner was listed, but there's one more surprise. Dell expects to release an LTE version of the phone in late 2011. Not telling is this phone will still look as good by then, but we're plenty excited to see it come out.

Image via Engadget