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The smartphone market is getting a bit crowded as of late.  You have Apple, RIM, HTC, and Palm among others all vying for the top spot, or just a piece of the ever-growing pie.  Smartphones represent the fastest growing market in consumer electronics, with expectations going up to 725 million sold this year.  It makes sense that someone would want to come in now.  But, is Dell really ready to swoop in and take a part of the market for themselves?

According to Shaw Wu, an analyst that seems very confident in his sources, Dell could be entering the market as soon as next month.  The announcement of a Dell smartphone could come during the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona that kicks off February 16th.  The smartphone would likely be the product of Ron Garriques, the man behind the Motorola RAZR who was hired by Dell two years ago.

Now, if this does prove to be true, there’s a lot that can easily go wrong with the smartphone.  The biggest is that it might run on Windows Mobile, which tends to be frustrating at best for most.  It could possibly run Android or Symbian, but from the consumer side it seems Dell tends to go with Microsoft more often, for better or worse.  Also, as mentioned in the original article, the design could go horribly wrong.  Dell has gotten a lot better with their product designs as of late, but there is a long history of Dell and bad design decisions.  In computers and laptops, design really isn’t a huge factor for most people, but a smartphone that is carried around everywhere should look nice.  Its something to make your friends jealous with, especially if the OS isn’t all that amazing, or there aren’t a lot of cool apps.

Although, this might be a great thing as well.  Even if the phone looks decent and runs Windows Mobile, if it can be hacked to run Android or some other OS as well as the Mini 9 can be hacked to run OS X, the phone would surely be popular among in at least one small niche of people.

Read [Wired]