Trio Of Leaked Dell Android Phones Impress

Dell has been holding back on us. It showed off its first Android smartphone -- the Mini 3 -- several months ago. It is meant for China, however, and not the U.S. Now, three more Android phones have made an appearance and they indicate that Dell is taking the smartphone game seriously.Yesterday, Ed Hansberry wrote about the leaked Windows Phone 7 device from Dell. Its name is the Lightning. Dell apparently likes naming phones after the weather, because the three Android devices are named the Flash, Smoke, and Thunder. The bad news is that these handsets won't make it to store shelves until very late in 2010 or early 2011. Let's take a look.

Flash

The Flash will be made of a curved piece of glass and will feature a 3.5-inch WVGA display. It will support tri-band HSDPA at 850/1900/2100MHz, meaning it's compatible with U.S. and European 3G networks. Download speeds can reach 14.4Mbps and upload speeds can hit 5.6Mbps (under optimal conditions). Other details include a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and image stabilization; 512MB of RAM and ROM; support for microSD cards up to 64GB; and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and an 800MHx processor. It will run Android 2.2 Froyo. All good!

Smoke

The Smoke will be the first Android handset of its kind. Think of the Palm Pixi or the Samsung BlackJack and you'll be in the ball park. It's a thin, touch phone, but has a full QWERTY keyboard below the display. The display will measure 2.8 inches. Other features are similar to the Flash. The differences are that microSD support drops from 64GB to 32GB, and Bluetooth drops from 3.0 to 2.1+EDR. It will run Android 2.2. Froyo.

Thunder

Last up is the Thunder, which is a high-end Android devices. It will have a 4.1-inch WVGA OLED display. It will run Android 2.1, but will also have a custom user interface developed by Dell called Stage. As with some of the competition, Stage promises to tie together social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. Specs are less clear on this one, but the Thunder is said to include an 8 megapixel camera, and will come in an AT&T-compatible version as well as an LTE version.