One of the largest desktop and mobile PC manufacturers has now set its sight on the smartphone market. Four upcoming Android-running smartphones leaked and their specs are nothing short of thrilling. The Dell Thunder, Aero, Smoke and Flash all pack pretty powerful hardware and impressive design.

The Dell Thunder is the company flagship, packing a 4.1″ WVGA OLED display and an 8 megapixel autofocus camera. There’s heavy emphasis on social-network integration and full support for Flash 10. Customized with a Dell home-brewed interface, the Dell Thunder will also feature a Hulu app in case you don’t want to use your browser for that.

The Dell Thunder will hit the shelves in Q4 of this year and there will be an LTE-enabled version shortly after that.

The Dell Smoke comes with an extraordinary design, adding a full QWERTY keyboard, below the 2.8″ QVGA screen (the aspect actually looks more like WQVGA). Android 2.2 Froyo is what this peculiar handset will be running and there will be an 800 MHz Qualcomm MSM7230 processor on board to do the calculations.

The rest of the noteworthy Dell Smoke specs include a 5 megapixel camera, 14.4Mbps HSPA, microSD card slot, WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. A second microphone secures noise cancelation.

Unfortunately we will have to wait until Q2 of 2011 to see the 10.5 mm thin Smoke in flesh.

The Dell Flash is candy bar running Android 2.2 Froyo with the custom Stage UI. It is built around a 3.5″ WVGA TFT display and it’s powered by a 800MHz Qualcomm with a hefty 512MB RAM and support for microSD cards up to 64GB (that would be SDXC we suppose).

The Flash, true to its name, has Flash 10 support in its browser. Also a 5MP autofocus camera withflash. On the connectivity side, the Dell Flash offers quad-band GSM/EDGE and tri-band 3G with HSPA, Wi-Fi with DLNA, Bluetooth 3.0, 3.5mm audio jack and TV-Out.

The Dell is aiming to make the Flash 11.0 mm thick and weigh less than 115g. They plan to make it out of curved glass and have it out in Q1 of 2011.

Finally, the Dell Aero is a pumped up Dell 3i. It has the same screen, but offers 3G with HSDPA, Wi-Fi, 5MP camera – in other words things that lack in the 3i. Dell plans to “refresh” the Aero with Android 2.1 later on, but it should first appear in Q3 or Q4 this year.

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Another big name in the computer industry is dipping their toes in the mobile phone market – Dell unveiled the Dell Mini 3i at an event on which China Mobile presented their online mobile store.

The spec sheet of the Dell Mini 3i is a bit self-contradicting. First off, it runs the China Mobile developed OMS – Open Mobile System, which is based on Android with TD-SCDMA phones in mind (TD-SCDMA is China’s own 3G brew). The Mini 3i isn’t 3G capable, just 2G GSM and doesn’t count on Wi-Fi or WAPI – Chinese equivalent of Wi-Fi (those Chinese sure like homegrown solutions). Bluetooth is the only local wireless connectivity method.

China Mobile launched an online store offering media, games and apps, which makes the lack of any sort of fast connection to the Interned a real downer. The store will cater a list of manufacturers including Nokia, Samsung and LG – plus apparently Dell. You can find the store at www.mmarket.com (it didn’t work for us but it may be a regional sort of thing).

The screen of the Dell Mini 3i is 3.5″ capacitive touchscreen with 360 x 640 pixels resolution. This resolution is a first for Android (OK, technically this isn’t pure Android but still).

While the touchscreen nature of the device sets the tone for the design, there’s something interesting about the front of the Mini – no keys. Vanilla Android is usable without the keys, but just barely, so the OMS interface will probably be very different – reportedly, it’s inspired by the iPhone (rather unsurprisingly). An ambient light sensor adjusts the backlight automatically.

The camera on the Mini 3i is a 3-megapixel one with LED flash. There’s a microSD card slot for storage. If OMS is anything like Android, it’ll have a really tough time doing almost anything without a card so the slot is pretty much a necessity.

A miniUSB port handles PC connectivity but whether it will be able to charge the phone is still not known.

The specs so far read as rather low-end, save for the screen, so the built-in GPS comes as a pleasant surprise, and one of the Mini 3i’s saving graces.

It’s hard to tell if we’ll ever see the Dell Mini 3i outside China, the launch date is not know either. Perhaps it depends on how well it performs, but more likely, it will stay China-only and Dell’s next attempts will be the ones that manage to get across the Great Wall (if any).

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