Tom Krazit
Dell's future laptops were briefly exposed by Google's search engine on Tuesday, before the spreadsheet was removed from a Dell FTP site and from Google's cache.
The basic configurations for the Dell Inspiron e1405, Inspiron e1505, Inspiron 640m and Inspiron 6400 were available, along with several other unannounced Dell products, via a Dell FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. A poster at technology review site NotebookReview.com noticed the spreadsheet and posted the link in one of the site's discussion forums.
A base configuration of the Inspiron 6400 will come with Intel's Core Solo T1300 processor for $830 (£470), with a 6400 laptop with the dual-core T2300 processor available for $880, according to the spreadsheet. The e1505 appears to be virtually the same laptop. Dell often releases very similar products under different brand names to target different audiences.
The Inspiron 640M will feature the T1300 Core Solo processor for $859 or the T2300 Core Duo processor for $959, according to the spreadsheet. The e1405 will be available in similar configurations for similar prices.
Dell appears to be planning to introduce Intel's Core Duo processor into its consumer and small-business laptops before moving over to its larger corporate customers, who are generally steered toward Latitude laptops. Dell earns the majority of its revenue from corporate accounts, but Intel's decision to accelerate the launch of the Core Duo processor has forced PC vendors to pick and choose their spots when introducing laptops based on Intel's most powerful laptop processor yet.
Dell's prices for all of the dual-core laptops revealed by the spreadsheet range from close to $900 to about $1,500, depending on the particular laptop and the configuration. Dell's ordering system lets customers pick and choose several different components while ordering a system. There was no information about other specifications, such as memory, hard drives, optical drives or display size.
"We do not comment on unannounced products," a Dell representative told CNET.co.uk's sister site News.com.
Google's search engine technology delivers an exhaustive list of responses to most queries, but information that companies and individuals would prefer to keep private is sometimes caught by Google's crawlers.
The home addresses of prominent politicians and corporate executives, such as Google CEO Eric Schmidt, can be found with a few carefully worded searches. The search engine keeps a cache of pages from the last time it crawled the Web, but Webmasters can use an automated system on Google's Web site to remove links that were not meant to be shared with the public.
A Google representative declined to comment on whether Dell requested the removal of the link to the cache. The dead link to the FTP site could also be found with Yahoo's search engine, where the cached link had also been removed.
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