Dell Mini 5 & MSI tablet prices appear — sort of

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Believe it or not, the Apple iPad isn’t the only tablet computer on the horizon. We last reported on the Dell Mini 5 a few weeks ago when it was on show at CES (and first heard about it back in October 2009), but now Dell CEO Michael Dell has been showing it off.

Michael Dell was at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland when TechCrunch cornered him with a video camera and snagged an awkward, not very insightful demo of the device. What’s more interesting is that TechCrunch thinks that the Dell Mini 5 will sell for $1,098 before any kind of carrier subsidy is applied.

Now this is clearly a lot for an Android-powered smartphone with a 5” screen and 1GHz Snapdragon processor — far too much, in fact, with you consider that the 10” Apple iPad starts at $499. But the things is, we can’t figure out where TechCrunch has plucked this information from — Michael Dell certainly doesn’t say it in the video; in fact, he inexpertly evades a specific question about the price.

So, take any predictions of doom for the Dell Mini 5 with a large pinch of salt, particularly any that repeat this unsubstantiated price.

MSI is also getting ready to release its 10” tablet that first saw light of day at CES, too. At least that’s what a story at DigiTimes reckons — it quotes MSI Sales Director Sambora Chen as saying that the NVIDIA Tegra-based tablet will be on sale by the latter half of this year for around $500, but will exist in a few different specifications to suit market demand — which could mean an even cheaper model eventually appears.

[MobileCrunch | DigiTimes]