AT&T’s Dell Aero – The more we know, the less we want to

The Dell Aero is AT&T’s second attempt with Android, and it hasn’t gotten any better since their first try. From the news we’re hearing now, and the upcoming devices Dell plans to bring to the table, I’ll be happy to forget about the Aero, thanks to AT&T.

From what we thought we knew before, the Aero would be lacking the Android Market. It wouldn’t be so surprising since AT&T had taken Google search out of the BackFlop in favor of Yahoo! search. But it looks like the Android Market will make it this round. Still, I wouldn’t get your hopes up to  have the option to download application outside of the Market.

One thing that seems interesting about the Aero is that it will be shipping with a dated version of Android, presumably 1.5. Dell has said that there will be a refresh of the Aero at some point, meaning upgrade to Android 2.1, but failed to mention whether the original would receive the update, or if just the new devices will ship with it.

We’ve known about the Aero for some time now, and since we’ve been waiting , it doesn’t look like many hardware changes have occurred. The processor is a low-end Marvell processor, which clocks out at 624MHz. This isn’t slow by any means, but now that the world has been graced with 1GHz speeds, it’s hard to see such a step backwards. Other things too expect from the Aero are a music store with Windows Media DRM (bah!), and 5 megapixel camera with flash. The Aero supports handwriting recognition, so the included capacitive stylus will come in handy.

The Aero could possibly come out in June, and a refreshed version of the device should be out later in the year with Android 2.1 on board. Sorry AT&T, Dell, not only will I pass on this one, I’m gonna run from it. Hello Flash.

[Via: AndroidAndMe]