Check out our full review of the Dell Latitude 10 tablet.
It was back in March that Dell’s chief commercial officer claimed the company saw future success in tablets running Windows 8, which just sounded like the tech equivalent of “there’s gold in them thar hills” at the time, but a new leak has given us our first look at a possible Dell device, and it’s suitably intriguing.
The subject of the leak is the Latitude 10, which appears on a confidential Dell spec sheet, and looks to be aimed at business users. The small picture doesn’t give much away about the design, but then it’s a tablet, and they all look almost identical to each other anyway.
It has a 10.1-inch screen with a 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, and its capacitive surface can be caressed using a finger or an included stylus.
Inside is a dual-core Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM and an Intel graphics card. Aside from it being based on x86 architecture, the other notable spec here is the processor, as it’s listed as Intel’s Clover Trail.
Revealed to be related to the Medfield smartphone SoC, an executive for Intel called the Clover Trail Atom chips “a vehicle for Windows 8 tablets” earlier this year. They’re based on Intel’s 32nm fabrication process, and have been linked with other Windows 8 tablets from manufacturers including Acer and Lenovo.
Going back to the Latitude 10, there will be a range of internal storage options available, but the only one listed is a 128GB SSD, which presumably will be the top-of-the-range offering.
Other features include a pair of cameras, 8-megapixel on the rear and 2-megapixel on the front, a fingerprint scanner, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and “mobile broadband options.” Interestingly, two different types of battery will be available, and they’ll be user-replaceable too.
Price and availability
There are two details missing from the Latitude 10’s spec sheet: Price and availability. Windows 8, along with its accompanying new hardware, is expected to show up in October or November, and Intel’s Clover Trail processors have also been linked with a late-2012 release.
A version of Dell’s Data Protection service called Essentials is listed under the Standard Security heading, and it has a Q1 2013 release date next to it, which could be inferred to mean the tablet will be released either then, or at the close of 2012.
Price is anyone’s guess at the moment, but it needs to be competitive to persuade people to take the plunge on what appears to be a laptop squeezed into a tablet. The Clover Trail chip is also unproven, as is its ability to provide decent performance on 2GB of RAM.
The Latitude 10 seen here isn’t official yet, and the specs may change between now and its release; but as it stands, we wonder how many people will choose it over one of the many ultrabooks currently flooding the market.
