Dell To Roll Out ‘Latitude On,’ Splashtop Like OS to Laptops

We caught the tail end of Dell’s streaming press event. Despite the rumors, an unveiling of the Dell Inspriron Mini did not happen. What did happen is the release of 10 new Dell Latitude business notebooks. Check out our first impressions of the E6400 here. At the end of the presentation, a Dell rep showed a short marketing video revealing Dell’s Latitude  On, a Splashtop-like, instant-on operating system. According to Dell, Latitude On will be available on the  Latitude E4200 and E4300 and will allow near-instant access to e-mail, calendar, attachments, contacts, and the Web without having to boot the system’s Vista operating system. Dell Latitude On reportedly uses a dedicated low-voltage sub-processor and OS that can enable multi-day battery life. Really? No images of the user interface were shown. Seems a lot like ASUS’ ExpressGate and Voodoo’s IOS pre-boot environments that are powered by Splashtop. We will be reporting more details as we get them.