What's happening with Dell?

Dell organised a press conference yesterday to unveil its new laptop, an 11.6 inch machine. Didn't anyone hear about it? Not very surprising...

They invented the international conference (our colleagues from Engadget were there and we owe them for this sublime ''shot of the winners'' below – for our part we turned down the invite as we were too busy with our tests) in the course of which a bezel is shown without any details on the spec being given.



Here you go, everything’s in the picture. Great, huh?

Beyond this strange idea, it’s also Dell’s behaviour in general that surprises us. We’ve been finding it hard to get our hands on Dell products to test for months. “Hard” is to put it mildly. We don’t actually get anything anymore. And our colleagues are not doing any better. Un collègue de SVM nous faisait part exactement du même problème ce midi.

In particular, we haven’t managed to get our hands on a single Dell screen for months. You have to say that their screens have been getting worse. We just don’t understand what’s going on. How could they massacre a range that up until recently was the absolute reference on the market? Colours were good but they’ve become very unreliable on most of their monitors. The display delay has also increased considerably on several screens. The only exception is the 2209WA... that we had to buy so we could test it! Are they so confident in its qualities, is it an accident that it turned out to be right or are there big problems at Dell? We recently asked them again for three screens we wanted to test. Our request was processed but we have neither seen nor heard anything since.

The same problem exists for laptops: Florent tells me he hasn’t received any of the 6 Dell laptops he has asked for to update our product surveys.

Now of course, manufacturers are free to hold back their products from us if they like. Sending models to the press for review is usually seen as a potential advertising opportunity by manufacturers, more effective than just taking out some space because an independent expert is telling you to buy. How should we interpret it when a manufacturer decides not to make the most of the opportunity? Especially when their attitude in the past was very different.

When you google ''Dell redundancies'' you do get quite a few recent sources. Is this linked? In any case we hope that this is a temporary situation: we like this manufacturer, we like the usual quality of the products. Lets hope things get back to normal soon!