At CES today, Dell unveiled another entry in its Windows 8 tablet line aimed at the small business and education markets. The Latitude 10 Essentials tablet is in essence a stripped-down version of the Intel Atom-based Latitude 10 tablet Dell announced in October. It's designed with one thing in mind: shipping an Intel-based "full featured, enterprise ready" tablet for under $500. It barely grazes that bar, at least in its lowest-priced configuration before adding a dock, a keyboard, and taxes.
Like its slightly more expensive doppelgänger, the 1.43-pound Latitude 10 Essentials has a magnesium alloy case and an iPad-like 10.1-inch Gorilla Glass touch-sensitive display. It's similarly equipped with a 1.8GHz Atom Z2760 "Clover Trail" processor and two gigabytes of RAM. But shaving $100 off the Latitude 10's price apparently required shedding a few things that some people might view as essential—such as a swappable battery. The Essentials tablet also lacks support for the optional active Wacom stylus, hardware-based Trusted Platform Module crypto, and AT&T mobile broadband support.
Latitude 10 Essentials comes with either a 32GB or 64GB solid-state drive, and it sports a combined audio jack, a single USB slot, and a full-size SD storage card slot. The device can also be plugged into a dock (if you add one) for access to four more USB ports, an audio jack, plus Ethernet and an HDMI port.
For schools and small businesses that want to run their Windows desktop apps on tablets and not be tied down to Office RT, the $499 price tag for the 32GB version of the Latitude 10 Essentials configuration may be enough to spark some interest. And Dell has a lead on HP's ElitePad, which won't ship until later in January. But there are plenty of other Clover Trail contenders in the $500 price range. A Dell spokesperson told Ars, "Windows 8 is showing a lot of promise in Dell’s testing on tablets and other form factors." But aside from "promise," the Windows 8 operating has yet to light any sort of fire under Dell's tablet and laptop sales, which have played a major part in the company's greater-than-industry-average PC sales decline.
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