It’s all over the interwebs already, but in case you haven’t heard, Dell made a pretty big –and colorful – splash today with the launch of Studio—a sleek, colorful and nicely loaded new product line designed to unleash the blogger/poet/novelist/artist/scrapbooker/YouTuber/Annie Leibovitz in all of us.

The first tranche of systems in the new line is two laptops – Studio 15 (15.4”) and Studio 17 (17”). John Biggs at the New York Times notes, “It’s summer, so why shouldn’t one’s laptop match one’s hot-pink bikini?… Optional Blu-ray or DVD recording drives ensure you can watch a movie under your beach umbrella, while built-in Wi-Fi, cellular broadband and Bluetooth keep things connected.”

For a quick overview of these systems take a look at this video with John New from Dell’s notebook team:

Of all the color options (seven different solid lids, plus four graphite with color insets), pink seems to be the most popular callout. The fashionable gearheads at GQ made note of the pink option, but were also impressed with Dell Dock, a simple, customizable task bar that replaces multiple icons on the desktop and sorts applications by category, that’s premiering with Studio. Wilson Rothman’s overview and very nice slide show on Gizmodo even hit the front page of Techmeme. To answer your question, Wilson, you can move the dock around.

For more on the Dell Dock, take a look at this vlog:

After backing in to a compliment about Studio’s “mouth watering colors” and “a few tasty extras, Charlie Sorrel at Wired also gives Dell Dock props and suggests that “The Studio is looking like a nice alternative to the MacBook.” Note to Charlie: Not exactly the way we’d put it, but thanks!

If you think beyond the box when buying a computer – read: if you accessorize whenever you can – don’t miss the color-matched Designed for Dell line of bags, mice/mouses, portable hard drives and other personalization options.

Lots of interesting ground to cover, so look for more on Studio, Dell Dock and Designed for Dell over the next few days.

Editor’s Note: This is the second and final segment of Jacqui Zhou’s post on China’s “Bandit” cell phone industry. If you missed the first installment, you can find it here.

Shan Zhai Ji, or Bandit Cell Phone, is gaining huge attention these days in China. In my previous post, I showed you its cool functions. Besides these functions, what other factors enable Shan Zhai Ji to obtain 25% of China’s cell phone market? Here are several:

Low price
A killer advantage of Shan Zhai Ji is its low price. Usually Shan Zhai Ji is sold at a fraction of the price of brand name phones. Check out the prices here from Taobao, the largest online c-2-c ecommerce site. You can get a phone with all those cool functions mentioned earlier for less than 2,000 RMB (about US $300). Unlike in the U.S. where cell phone hardware prices are subsidized by service providers, Chinese customers have to pay full price for their cell phones with the freedom to choose service providers of their choice. A decent cell phone can easily cost $500.

How can Shan Zhai Ji be sold at such a low price? In 2006, a Taiwan integrated circuit company called MediaTek developed turnkey solutions for cell phones which combine cell phone circuit board with software. It used to cost cell phone companies hundreds of designers months to develop such a solution and now anyone can buy the platform from MediaTek and make their own cell phones. Needless to say, Shan Zhai Ji has its cost benefits because their manufactures steal designs and ideas from other companies, avoid quality and safety compliance, sometimes use shoddy materials, evade taxes and spend no money on customer service.

Low-end target market
More than 90% of Chinese use cell phones. It has become a must-have communication tool throughout the country with more users than landlines. Yet not everyone can afford expensive handsets. Shan Zhai Ji aims at this huge low-end market with its functional yet inexpensive products. They pay a lot of attention to functions and details that are important to shrewd Chinese customers. They don’t invest in building their own distribution channel but are willing to share a big chunk of their profits with resellers and sales people, a very effective method to stimulate sales.

Fast innovations
Shan Zhai Ji manufacturers move very fast. Whenever they see a new trend, they study it and come up with near-identical copies within weeks. Even when the market seems small, they are willing to go for it. For example, they designed cell phones blessed by monks for Buddhists, cell phones with a taser feature for women and cell phones preinstalled with stock market program for avid investors. They even let you build-to-order, where you can add your name and design to the phone and personalize your functions. However small the niche market is, their nimble structure enables them to move along with the market trend.

Unique culture
Shan Zhai Ji attracts many Chinese with its grass roots humor. They do not try to hide the fact that they are copy cats. On the contrary, they make fun of it. For example, they named the knock-off of Apple “iPhone” as “Orange.” It really rubs Chinese people the right way. I asked my friends and most said they really appreciate the non-assuming attitude of Shan Zhai Ji. They laugh at Shan Zhai Ji but at the same time enjoy the convenience of multi functions at low cost. The Chinese media and blogosphere have been discussing the “innovation” side of Shan Zhai Ji, despite all its other obvious misdeeds. Right now, about 40% of Shan Zhai Ji is exported to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think you should buy such a phone. Besides the fishy copyright issues, you never know the quality/safety of the products and customer service and tech support after sales is practically zero.

Yet with such a trend happening in the world’s largest market, I cannot help wondering whether Shan Zhai Ji will evolve to become a force in the global cell phone market?

Editor’s Note: Shanghai native Jacqui Zhou manages the Direct2Dell Chinese blog. This is the first of a two-part post in which she gives Your Blog readers a glimpse into a marketplace that can be starkly different than our own. 

Natalie blogged about some of the world’s most expensive cell phones the other day. While the newly rich in China are all over everything brand-name, there is an emerging trend in the world’s largest cell phone market that goes in the opposite direction.

The phenomenon is called Shan Zhai Ji, which I would like to translate as Bandit Cell Phone. It refers to white box cell phones manufactured by unauthorized or small-scale factories on the southeast coast of China.

Though the popularity of Shan Zhai Ji has been building for some time, the buzz only surfaced after recent news coverage from China Central Television, the national television station. Shan Zhai Ji has since generated tons of discussions in the Chinese blogosphere. I won’t be surprised if one day people around me think it is cooler to carry a Shan Zhai Ji than an iPhone. Shan Zhai Ji is apparently becoming a unique sub-culture with dedicated Web sites promoting it. 

As background information, you might want to know that with the fierce competition from global brands like Nokia and Motorola, most Chinese brand name cell phones have seen better days. So how does Shan Zhai Ji manage to survive and even acquire 25% of China’s handset market? 

Shan Zhai Ji copies the designs of popular products such as iPhone and BlackBerry. At the same time, they throw in a lot of other useful functions that mainstream companies do not. For example, extra-long stand-by time of up to one month, dual SIM card support, quadruple cameras and speakers, radio, GPS, touch screen, extra large screen, handwriting recognition, and compatibility with all types of media files.

Shan Zhai Ji even has a lot of functions that you never dream of, such as analogue TV reception tuner, taser, ultraviolet laser for testing counterfeit bank notes and even fortune telling programs. These highly localized functions with Chinese characteristics are not usually on the radar screen of a multinational company’s design team.

Don’t assume all Shan Zhai Ji are mere imitations. Sometimes you will be amazed by the imagination of those Shan Zhai Ji designers.

This is not a pack of cigarettes. It is a cell phone. Yet you can insert as many as seven cigarettes into it.

It has micro SD card slot.

It even has a 1.3 mega pixel camera.

Adding a couple of more bucks, you can get different covers.

A cell phone with Beijing Olympics mascot.  

This watch-like cell phone incorporates four microphones, metallic rim and a camera.

It is not a Ferrari toy car. Turn it around and you will find a cell phone key pad and screen.

Hopefully I’ve given you a good overview of Shan Zhai Ji. In my next post, I would like to walk you through some of reasons why Shan Zhai Ji has attracted such a big following in China, as well as Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Stay tuned!

It’s clearly the summer of the phone. From the BlackBerry Curve to the Samsung Instinct to Apple’s iPhone 3G, the buzz is everywhere. Even Samantha and Miranda clearly positioned their phones as their fav accessory in the Sex and The City Movie. You can’t watch TV or read the paper without seeing the latest story, phone comparison or advertisement for the best deal on these new phones.  So what are the elite carrying this summer?

Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, and Armani are just a few of the top designers who have recently put out a branded phone. With general prices around $5,000 USD and essential functionality including touch screens and cameras, these are starting to pop up all over Hollywood, Milan and Paris. But I’d rather showcase the crème da la crème; the ones you are most likely not seeing because only a select few can pay the price.

So let’s start at the very top with Christian Dior’s $26,000 USD Crocodile Skin “Lady Dior” Mobile Phone. Yes, you’re reading correctly, and no it’s not a typo of a couple extra zeros:

Plush crocodile skin and a colossal 640 Swarovski crystals, totaling 3,251K, make this phone a beauty.  Designed in partnership with Modelabs, the clamshell fashion phone has a 2.6” touch screen with a QVGA resolution and a 2 Megapixels camera.

Too expensive for your taste? Then allow me to introduce the $14,000 USD African Blackwood and white diamonds Cell Phones by Gresso, a Russian company that recently stunned the marketplace with the release of their new phones:

These phones are made of incredible materials such as titanium, 42K sapphire crystal glass for the display, 200-year-old African blackwood for the panels, and 18K gold and 2.53K diamond coated keys. The African blackwood and diamonds make no two phones exactly the same, or as Gizmodo puts it, each one is unique like a snowflake.

If you’re anything like me, which is someone who accidently drops, throws, and often loses their cell phone, the thought of losing or destroying one at this price would make my stomach turn. Yet the idea of touching diamonds every time I dial a number is quite intriguing…

How much is too much to spend on a cell phone? Looking forward to your comments and thoughts.

I grew up in Longview, Texas, and went to school where uniforms were the way of life. Differentiating yourself from your classmates was, well, a challenge. It’s like one of my favorite, fashionable quotes: “The only thing that separates us from the animals is the ability to accessorize.” Literally, that was really the only way to separate yourself from others. 

Today, personalization is the way of life, and companies that help us showcase our style in a unique way, well, they rule the world.

I recently had the opportunity to meet Mark Batliner, VP of direct sales for SkinIt. If you’re not familiar with SkinIt, perhaps you’ve heard the term “skins.” No, I’m not talking about a flag football team. SkinIt makes skins and provide the ultimate in personalization for your laptop, desktop or just about any electronics device.

Take a look at Mark’s vlog to get the full scoop. Oh, and for those of you who have procrastinated buying a Father’s Day gift – yep, it’s this Sunday – you may want to pay close attention to the “Create Your Own” page. You can import pictures and “create your own” skin. Enjoy! And don’t forget to come back to Your Blog and let us know what you think.

Ok, I’ll admit it. T-Shirts have come a LONG way. I went through a good 10-year t-shirt wearing dry spell. Maybe it’s because I have several tee’s in my closet that are destined to follow in the long line of t-shirts to become the next dust rags in our house, but have somehow avoided the scissors; probably for nostalgic reasons. Seriously, who isn’t ready to cut up the quintessential shirts, “Somebody loves you in Toledo” or “I went to Hawaii and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”? Exactly.

Today’s trendy tee’s have moved in a completely different direction. They can be chic, stylish and, yes, socially interactive. Trend Hunter Magazine stumbled across a company out of Washington called edoc laundry that takes the idea of interaction and t-shirts to a whole new level. Each t-shirt has an original design with an embedded message, which can be entered on their Web site to unlock part of the secret behind an online murder mystery, still waiting to be solved. With trendy styles and cuts for men and women combined with an interactive challenge, it’s hard to imagine consumers around the world will not be trying to unlock ‘who dun it?’ in the murder mystery before long.

As for my “Tech-cessory & Accessory” pick of the week, the mysterious nature of these shirts reminded me of Mike Ming’s inspirational designs that are available on our Inspirons. Both are departures from the tradition and standard of their counterparts and both promise to drive social interaction:

Tech-cessory

Inspiron 1525 Mike Ming ‘Bunch O Surfers’ Laptop

Accessory - For Him

Edoc Laundry ‘Warrior’ Men’s T-Shirt

Accessory - For Her

Edoc Laundry ‘Carnivale’ Women’s T-Shirt

Looking forward to your thoughts and comments on this new way to drive social interaction. What would you code or hide in a secret message on a t-shirt if you could?

At the risk of offending my good friends in the Dell Consumer online team, I think sneaker companies are kicking some serious a** when it comes to usability and brand experience in online product configurators. My recent search for the perfect sporty casual shoe led me to several Web sites that offered not only great style and customization options, but also a great shopping experience that makes me want to go back – and, obviously, to spread the word.

I’d seen K-Swiss shoes that I liked in a store, and started my search there. The My K-Swiss site is basic (only two base color choices – black or white), but offered a style I liked (the “Classic Luxury Edition”) and plenty of color options for the stripe color, lace color and K-Swiss “shield” on the tongue. It was easy, there was no guessing and I had my first pair of custom kicks within a few weeks. When I revisited the site while writing this post, I noticed that they’ve made the very savvy move of adding customization options for universities. There are only seven schools right now, but fortunately the University of Wisconsin is one of them – and you can get Bucky Badger on the tongue!

The Converse site was my next stop, and it had much to commend it from a design choice and experience standpoint. There were several more base models to choose from, and several more customization options – materials for the upper, distinct color choices for the inside and outside body, as well as for the heel stripe and tongue. I bought a pair there, too, but wish I’d waited until after their recent refresh – 12 styles to choose from now, plus a plentitude of options for (RED) versions. They’ve even launched a new initiative called 1HUND(RED), which will feature custom designs by 100 artists from around the world to help eliminate AIDS in Africa.

Puma has a visually sumptuous site called Mongolian BBQ, that’s quite literally laid out like its namesake, and the mouse pointer is an arm holding a pair of chopsticks that picks your color selection out of its bowl. Unfortunately, that’s as far as I’ve gotten – maybe too much of a good thing.

That’s just a sample of my humble experience in the sneaker sub-culture. Real collectors should check out the sneakers blog at Complex.com.

I might be sensitized because of the hoopla, but since the launch of pink XPS 1330 and 1530 versions last week, I’ve begun noticing that pink is positively pervasive online and off. I thought it might be a spring thing, but according to some trend watchers, pink’s now a year-round fashion staple for women, and it’s showing up front and center in personal technology as well.

“Pinks are as popular with technology products as they are with clothing this spring,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “Now-a-days, consumers are using and carrying colorful laptops and technology products as a way to express themselves.”

That insight has not been lost on Dell. The Mother’s Day online and catalog promos are a profusion of pink (OK, I’m done with the alliteration) In addition to the aforementioned laptops, there’s an array of pink tech, including a Fuji digital camera,  an Iomega portable hard drive and an assortment of pink carrying cases.

We are truly living in an age of self-expression. And when it comes to personal technology, from smart phones to laptops, we love to personalize. What we carry often defines us. It can tell others who we are, who we aspire to be and how we live our lives.

Since the beginning of Dell, we’ve taken pride in how we’ve enabled you to custom-create PCs that offer just the right functionality. But functionality is just a piece of what’s important – many of us want our PCs to reflect our individuality or a youthful style.

We think many computer aficionados will like how we’ve combined artist Mike Ming’s work with the compact Inspiron 1525 laptop. Inspired by the movement and abstract momentary communication from surfing, movement of water and the world around him, Ming’s work is vivid, empowering and playful.

The Special Art Edition Inspiron 1525 laptop, available beginning today, features two exclusive works by the New York artist … BunchOSurfers and SeaSky:

Using a new Dell manufacturing technique, every color and brushstroke come alive on the laptop’s cover, bringing the same fluid, graffiti-inspired tattoo effect that you find on Ming’s canvas. You can check them out, and an exclusive video on the inspiration behind these pieces of art, at www.dell.com/art.

Starting at $499 $699, personalizing your PC with artistic flair is more affordable than ever. Do let us know what you think and how they inspire.

My good friend and long-time colleague Lionel is a bit bummed today. You see Lionel is “the tech guy” here – you know the type – the one folks go to when they have a technical question. The guy who can shift to a different language when talking about the technologies and features found on today’s high end PCs. Lionel actually walks the talk – he uses his XPS 720 as a media center – recording hi-def TV shows, streaming them to an Xbox 360 from the PC via Ethernet in their home office to the living room, and storing thousands of pictures of his seriously cute kids and wife on their family adventures so they can be viewed on the widescreen, high-definition TV.

He’s also a part-time gamer (having kids and being head blogger have put a serious dent in the amount of time he can spend on that particular hobby for now). So why is Lionel feeling a little blue today? Because I get to write the introductory post on our newest flagship gaming system - the XPS 730 and XPS 730 H2C. This system is packed full of so many new, high performance, totally cool (no pun intended) technologies that it’s hard to know where to begin.

First and foremost –the XPS 730 series is based on an industry-standard ATX motherboard, powered by the NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset with all features intact. Rest easy that when the latest and greatest graphics cards come out in the future you can honestly wrestle with the decision whether to make that monthly car/house payment or your upgrade your system.

Next, I think we should examine the “fantastic four” theme this system has going for it. It was built to take on quad core processors (the Core 2 Duo Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz processor ships factory overclocked to 3.8GHz). It has more than enough power to take on a quad GPU graphic solution –like the ATI Radeon™ HD3870 X2 CrossFireX (stay tuned for other options). And you can get it configured with up to four hard drives factory installed, and pre-configured in a variety of RAID arrays (a quick customer poll indicated that a popular config will be two- drive RAID 0 for Operating System and two- drive RAID 1 for data.) Jesse Recinos product manager for the XPS 730 provides a bit more detail in the video.

 Now – about overclocking – oops wait – have to work in a word from our sponsor: With any overclocked component, there’s a risk for system instability. Overclocking is always a balance between performance and stability – for more information see Lionel’s original post on this. Back to our post – in addition to shipped factory overclocked processors, we will ship DDR3 Corsair DOMINATOR memory factory overclocked up to 1600 MHz. Louis Bruno has additional details on overclocking in this video.

Now for one of the cooler features (pun intended) - all this need for speed can of course lead to possible unintentional consequences (aka impact system stability) so our thermal and cooling engineers took the opportunity to enhance our patent-pending H2C cooling solution. When we first introduced the H2C cooling solution, engineer Chuck Hood took the time to drill down into the details in one of our first VLOGs. It proved to be one of our most popular videos, so we asked Chuck to come back and go over the enhancements made in the new edition.

Finally, I’d like to share a little know fact about the XPS 730 chassis. For those of you who have seen the XPS 7-series desktop in person you know it’s a massive system (I speak from experience – during CES this year I got to schlep one from the LVCC to New York, New York for an NVIDIA press event, then to Caesars for another press event, and then I put it in a taxi with my husband to head back to our hotel, while I headed to yet another event.) The original forward-leaning design was inspired by a jet engine cowl, optimized for air flow. Unless you’ve actually had your hands on one of these bodies, you probably don’t realize the outer skin is 2.4mm aluminum. When the design was first introduced it was the largest milled aluminum piece in the industry. The finish, created at an aluminum mill, is preserved at great effort throughout the manufacturing process. (in fact the chassis mechanical design /assembly process is patent pending). Today’s XPS 730 has a choice of finishes: brushed aluminum in silver, or anodized aluminum in Stealth Blue or Victory Red. When asked for any other fun facts, design team’s response says it all: “It’s bad ass.” Nuff said.

Game On!