Dell To Kill Kiosks, May Build Google Phone
Dell computer kiosks have become a familiar sight in malls across the United States and Canada, but the computer giant may be making those small mall carts a thing of the past. Just after the Round Rock, Texas-based company slashed jobs in Ottawa, Canada, rumors began circulating that Dell would begin closing mall kiosks will soon meet the corporate axe—this comes from sources close to the tech blog Engadget, which points out the redundancy of Dell kiosks in malls seeing as how Dell computers are now available at major retailers including Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
So what will Dell be focusing on in the future? According to the Irish tech agency The Silicon Republic, there are rumors that Google and Dell may partner soon to bring about the much-anticipated Google Phone. Dell’s Internet chief Vint Cerf has sworn in the past that Google and Dell would never partner together to build a Google Phone, but the Silicon Republic says industry analysts are full of chatter that Google and Dell may be doing just what Cerf said they wouldn’t.
Dell has never created a mobile phone before, instead choosing to focus on PDAs that lack mobile phone technology. 
Google has created an open-sourced software called Android. The Open Sourced Handset Alliance, as Google is calling it, is partnered with mobile phone service providor T-Mobile and handset manufacturer Motorola, among a few others.
The introduction of Google into the mobile phone market has been a fantasy of Google enthusiasts for a few years now, anticipating what Google could bring ingenuity-wise to the mobile phone market the way the search engine giant has done to e-mail and city-wide Wi-Fi. Industry analysts say if a Dell-Google partnership is in the works, it will likely be announced ina few weeks at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.
One thing is for sure, though: Dell is making major cutbacks in costs by eliminating more than 8,000 jobs worldwide, including the 1,000 in Canada mentioned earlier. Dell had initially announced an expansion in its Ottawa, Canada call center offices—an expansion that has now been killed with the announcement of these cost-cutting measures. Customer service at Dell has long been criticized for being some of the worst in the computer industry. To combat its low scoring in customer satisfaction, Dell announced that it was spending more than $100 million to better its services to customers. Dell is one of the worldwide leaders in Windows-operating PC computers.
UPDATE: Dell officially announced this morning that they will be shutting down every one of its mall kiosks across the United States.
I'm a 21-year-old technology, music and local media blogger from Sacramento, California.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I don’t find the Dell side of this story very interesting to be honest. Dell’s advantage was always that they cut out the middle man and passed the savings along to the customer. In that context the kiosks made sense. Now that everyone has adopted that trick and Dell has been forced to take its place as “yet another vendor on the Best Buy shelf” it no longer makes sense to have their own presence.
What I do find interesting is the Google side. The problem Android has is that it’s little more than a joke to most people in the software world. With no phone available or even announced at this point they are forced to offer contest money to small developers in the hopes of creating enough software to get someone interested in this platform. But no serious software developers will touch the thing because there’s no profit to be had.
Moreover they are back into a corner because, even though they have tons of cash, they can’t build a phone themselves. If they do they might as well kiss any other vendor goodbye because everyone’s watching them right now. No one’s ever going to build an Android phone until they feel they can trust Google to not enter the market themselves.
So if they can parlay Dell’s desperation into an actual phone I say more power to them. I don’t think the Dell phone will be successful or even good really but it will be an actual phone and that’s a start. Microsoft had to deal with having HTC as their only vendor for a long, long time before other companies jumped in but the HTC phones at least gave the platform some credence. You could write a program for the Smartphone platform and then go buy a phone and see it work. Dell could do that for Android and that’s exactly what Google needs right now.