Although Dell hasn’t made any formal announcements yet, it’s no secret that the company plans to enter the lucrative smartphone market eventually; and now an image of what appears to be their first offering has leaked onto the web. The rather blurry image first appeared on Chinese-language site PDAFans, showing a vaguely Palm Pre-looking device with rounded edges and a Dell logo prominently displayed on the front.


Of course this is probably the same prototype to which carriers responded negatively earlier this year on the basis of “lack of differentiation” from current and upcoming smartphones. No details regarding its innards were made available, of course, but the device appears to be running Google’s Android platform. It is still not known exactly when Dell plans on delivering its new smartphones, but unconfirmed reports claim products based on both Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Google's Android should be ready before the end of 2009.