Dell Defends Latitude XT Pricing

Complaints about Dell's new $2,499 tablet have prompted the company to directly address critics who claim it's too expensive.

You’ll never see Porsche, Ferrari or Lamborghini PR flacks sit down and explain why their cars are so expensive in a company blog – but then again, they’re hawking sex-on-wheels, not tablet PCs. After a chorus of complaints rose up when Dell announced its high-end, high-price Latitude XT tablet, Dell took the rather unusual step of addressing price complaints in a blog entry.

Senior manager Glenn Keels from Dell’s commercial products team defended the XT’s hefty $2,499 price tag Tuesday morning on the Direct2Dell blog. “The most important thing to note about tablet PCs is that we are talking about cutting-edge technology here,” Keels wrote. “The result is that our product does carry a slight premium to our competition (emphasis on the word ‘slight’).”

To diminish the price difference between the XT and its competitors, Keels listed stats from both the HP 2710p (1,599+) and Lenovo ThinkPad X61t ($1,518+), showing the Latitude XT beating out both on brightness, graphics, thickness, weight, and input capability. The most significant difference: a capacitive touch screen (the same type used on the iPhone) which has yet to appear on any other mainstream tablet PCs.

Keels did not directly address other important hardware specs, and while he mentioned that the overall difference between the Dell and its competitors was only 8 to 13 percent after adjusting for “non-standard features such as Dell’s standard 3 year standard warranty,” no more details were provided on exactly which features would whittle down a price difference of more than  $900.

A second wave of complaints in response to Keels’ entry would seem to indicate that his attempt to justify the price, while noble, didn’t quite quell the masses.