Dell on Sidelines of Mobile Race, But Can It Afford to Stay There?

Dell has spent the past couple of years trying to crack the mobile device market, but despite significant investment, the PC maker has little to show for the effort.

Even before the company’s move to stop selling the 7-inch Streak tablet, Dell has been largely a footnote. It has announced several tablets and phones over the past couple of years, but all have faded without garnering significant market share or critical acclaim.

Although it still sells some of those devices in certain markets, Dell is at something of a crossroads. The company must decide whether it is willing to re-ante in a serious way or if it wants to cash in its chips and focus on its core PC business instead.

It’s a tough call. On the one hand, the tablet and smartphone field is crowded with PC and mobile device competitors; just how Dell might catapult itself into relevance is not immediately obvious. At the same time, though, the mobile market is one of the fastest-growing pieces of the tech market, and is arguably too big and important to ignore.

What is clear is that nothing it has tried so far has worked.

The company has sold Venue-branded smartphones running both Android and Windows Phone 7, though neither has gained much carrier support or appeared to spark much interest from consumers.

Dell’s boldest move was probably its 5-inch Streak, which was first shown at the D8 conference in May 2010. Somewhere between the phones and tablets of the time, the Streak was an interesting gamble. The company wasn’t necessarily wrong about the size — there are now phones nearly that big, and tablets, like Samsung’s Galaxy Note, that are that small.

But neither that Streak, which was discontinued in August, nor its more clearly tablet-size successor, managed to sway many consumers. Similarly, Dell’s Venue line of phones has not been able to stand out from the pack. More importantly, Dell hasn’t been able to win much in the way of marketing support and subsidies from cellular carriers.

In addition, the executive who headed many of its recent efforts — former Motorola executive Ron Garriques — is no longer at the company.

So now what?

While Dell could try to stake out a position in its more familiar turf — the small-business and enterprise markets — even those areas of the mobile market tend to be dictated as much by consumer sentiment as corporate directives.

The company could also put more energy behind its collection of mobile-related services, such as helping other companies to manage and secure their mobile devices, and to create custom applications.

Any new strategy, says Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg, will require Dell to be bold enough to stand out, and committed enough to take the time it needs to convince customers it is serious about the market.

“It feels like a lot of the stuff they are doing is reactive instead of proactive,” Gartenberg said. “In the mobile space that just doesn’t work.”