Dell enters the US smartphone battles with the Aero on AT&T, running an ancient version of Android

Dell stepped into the Android smartphone foray in the US by announcing the Aero for AT&T back in March. The phone can now be ordered on Dell.com/mobile for $99 on a two-year AT&T plan, or a $299 sans contract price. The checkout system returned a preliminary ship date of August 26th for the handset.

The Aero has a 3.5" capacitive display with 360x640 pixels of resolution, 5MP camera with autofocus and flash, and a 2GB microSD card included in the package. Nothing is missing in terms of connectivity either - the Dell Aero has 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS.

The only parameters holding it back seem to be the fairly slow 624MHz Marvell CPU, and the Android 1.5 (Cupcake) it is running. Dell has customized the UI thoroughly, but still, why a two-year old Android version, Michael?!

On the other hand, it is very light at 3.67 ounces (hence the Aero name, we guess), and the "superset" version of Cupcake has Flash Lite for music and video streaming, as well as documents editing, phonebook and calendar integration with Facebook, handwriting recognition, and Microsoft Active Sync e-mail capabilities. No release date for the Dell Aero is announced yet.

Peep at the gallery and video below, and tell us what you think.

source: Direct2Dell