Thoughts On Dell's Phone

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on January 30

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an intriguing story about Dell’s apparent plans to enter the smart phone business. It’s not clear what platform Dell will use. Apparently Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile are on the table. Maybe they’ll use both.

But here’s the detail that caught my attention: The phones are being designed in an office in the Chicago area. That to me says this Dell phone will essentially be designed by former Motorola people.

Ron Garriques, the former head of Motorola’s phone division, is at Dell, and will be allowed to work on phone products beginning next month when his non-compete agreement expires. Meanwhile another former Moto guy, John Thode, who’s involved with Dell’s netbook products, is said to be managing Dell’s phone development group, as the Journal puts it “in isolation from others at Dell.” The effort has even been kept secret from some Dell execs.

Before Apple’s iPhone became the darling of the wireless design world, Motorola was the king of the hill, and the guy who in charge of its Chicago-based industrial design group is Jim Wicks who I interviewed in mid-2005 before I worked for BusinessWeek. They’re smart industrial designers, whose phones have been hampered by utterly lousy software whose features are impossible to use. I bought Motorola phones for years, but rarely did anything more sophisticated than make voice calls and send the occasional text message because the interface always made me work harder than should have been necessary. The Blackberry and later the iPhone changed that for me. (I carry both.)

If Dell has hired former Moto designers — and given all the layoffs in Motorola’s handset division it’s not hard to imagine that it has — then it will be interesting to see what it comes up with. Granted Dell is not known for pushing any envelopes. The adjective I usually use to describe its hardware is “vanilla.” Maybe it’s got something that’s just a little more interesting on tap this time around? Dell would be well advised to let its designers run wilder than it accustomed to, especially on any phones that might be running Android, because it needs something to raise its otherwise pitiful “cool” quotient, even if it just barely moves the needle.

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