GITEX: Dell Interview with Mr. Phil Bryant

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mr. Phil Bryant, the Vice President and General Manager of Dell for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Consumer division.

I started the conversation by asking his thoughts on losing out to Acer for the number two spot world-wide- especially how Dell competes with Acer in the region where Acer is pretty much considered to be the market leader. He said “Realistically, Dell entered the consumer space in the Middle East just a couple of years back and before that, you would hardly see any models available at the retail channel.” He’s very proud of how far they’ve come in the last two years in the Middle East, mentioning how you can very easily find Dell in almost all major Hyper Markets and Super Stores along with dedicated Dell stores.

I asked him about their sales strategy and how Dell only used to be available online in the region before they went all out with retail. He replied that was quite sometime back when Dell wasn’t actively involved in the region and the online model was more-or-less, just an extension of Europe with very few products that could be shipped to the UAE.

He said “Every territory has a different aspect as far as purchase is concerned. For example in the UK, people go to a Dell store and check out the available models but then make a call to make the purchase most of the time. In other parts of the world, people look at the specs online and then buy the product in a store or vice versa.”

Next we spoke on the subject of Netbooks and I mentioned to him that Michael Dell had voiced his displeasure over Netbooks yet Dell is pretty actively participating in that sector. He pointed to his Blackberry and said that by the end of the day, he’s tired of using it and would much rather use a PC to send out emails but the form and functionality are worth the sacrifice in size. “Netbooks aren’t meant to be your primary computers and are great to take with you when traveling abroad purely because of their portability and allowing you to be in touch with the rest of the world. But for anything more serious or for longer usage, you would probably use your regular notebook.”

I also asked him about Dell’s relations with telcos and he agreed that out of the box connectivity is the way forward. He said that one of his friend’s recently told him a story of the daughter complaining to her father that their PC was not working. When the father went to check the PC, it was very much working, but it was only the Internet that wasn’t working. “Connectivity has become so incredibly important to everything we do that we are actively forming partnerships with telcos around the world to provide out-of-the-box connectivity.”

I also asked him about Dell showing off some Smartphone designs in China and he said that Dell is very much interested in this market. “Dell is looking into providing many different types of form factors in such devices- so it could be something that looks like a Smartphoneor bigger- say with a 5″ inch screen.”

That was about as much time as I had but at the end of the interview, however, I was given the opportunity to play around with the extremely anticipated Dell Adamo XPS ultra thin notebook. I must say that the design is quite impressive with three LEDs around the hatch that you swipe your fingers over to unlock. You then flip the lid open and a chiclet style keyboard is present on the bottom along with an average sized track pad. The bottom part of the screen acts as a stand as seen in pictures released by Dell last week and allows for airflow while two speakers are present on the back. I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures of the unit which should be launching along pretty soon.