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Shares of Dell got a boost after the computer maker reported an unexpectedly strong quarter despite concerns about a PC market slowdown. By product category, the company saw the biggest gain in servers and networking, where revenue rose 11 percent to $2 billion. Dell is focusing on more profitable areas of its business.
Dell Inc. said Tuesday that its net income for the latest quarter nearly tripled as the personal computer Relevant Products/Services maker benefited from lower computer component costs and growth in some of its more profitable product lines.

Shares of Dell, which beat analysts' adjusted net income estimates but came in a bit below revenue estimates, rose 5 percent in extended trading.

For the three months that ended April 29, Dell earned $945 million, or 49 cents per share Relevant Products/Services, compared with $341 million, or 17 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding one-time items, Dell earned 55 cents per share, easily beating what Wall Street expected. Analysts polled by FactSet forecast adjusted earnings of 43 cents per share.

Revenue rose just 1 percent to $15.02 billion from $14.9 billion last year, missing analyst estimates for $15.4 billion. Product revenue remained flat at $12.1 billion, while services revenue climbed 6 percent to $3.0 billion.

In Dell's consumer segment, which makes up about 20 percent of its revenue and so is much smaller than the portion of its revenue that comes from sales to businesses, dropped 7 percent to $3.0 billion.

Consumer demand fell more than Dell anticipated and, in an interview, Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden attributed some of this to the market for consumer PCs being saturated in developed countries. He added that while tablet Relevant Products/Services computers are still a small portion of the PC Relevant Products/Services market, there's "clearly an impact" from them on consumer demand for traditional PCs.

Revenue from large enterprises climbed 5 percent to $4.5 billion, while revenue from small and medium-size businesses increased 7 percent to $3.8 billion. Public sector revenue declined 2 percent to $3.8 billion.

By product category, the company saw the biggest gain in servers and networking, where revenue rose 11 percent to $2.0 billion. Sales of desktop Relevant Products/Services PCs fell 8 percent to $3.3 billion, while mobile Relevant Products/Services PCs rose 3 percent to $4.7 billion.

Dell has been working to increase the proportion of server computers, data Relevant Products/Services storage Relevant Products/Services devices and technology Relevant Products/Services consulting services it sells, because those areas are more profitable than the company's basic PC business Relevant Products/Services. Compared with a year ago, however, most of Dell's product categories accounted for about the same percentage of revenue, and computers for consumers and businesses continued to make up more than half of Dell's revenue.

Still, Dell's gross margin, an indicator of how efficient Dell's business is, came in at 22.9 percent, higher than the 20.4 percent that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting.

Dell's strategy of focusing on more profitable areas of its business and pruning lower-margin offerings "is working well," Gladden said.

Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves called the company's gross margin "impressive" and said Dell should be able to keep it up for now.

"They do have the potential to sustain margins long term, but in order to do so they have to drive toward more services-oriented businesses," he said.

Looking at the current quarter, Dell predicted revenue will rise by a percentage in the mid-single digits over the first quarter, slightly faster than its seasonal 2 percent to 3 percent growth. Analysts are expecting $16.0 billion.

For the full fiscal year, the company continues to expect revenue to grow 5 percent to 9 percent, implying a total of $64.6 billion to $67.0 billion. Analysts expect annual revenue of $64.4 billion.

Dell shares rose 86 cents, or 5.4 percent, to $16.76 in extended trading. The stock finished regular trading down 10 cents at $15.90.

Dell Streak Pro Tablet

Dell is reportedly readying its new 10-inch Streak Pro media tablet with Android Honeycomb for a June release. If so, that would confirm previously published information about Dell's commercial tablet roadmap.


But the tablet will utilize Nvidia's dual-core, 1.0GHz Tegra 2 T20 system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform, according to unnamed sources cited by German-language Tweakers.net in a Thursday report, not the faster, 3D-capable Tegra 2 T25 SoC as had been earlier reported.

The Dell Streak Pro features a 1280 x 800 touchscreen, weighs in at 1.59 pounds, and has a number of accessories, including a docking station with built-in keyboard, according to Tweakers.net.

The Streak Pro, a business-targeted cousin to the smaller consumer-oriented Streak and Streak 7 tablets from Dell, will come in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flavors, according to the site. The device has an SDHC memory slot in addition to 1GB of on-board memory, a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

There will also be options featuring AT&T 4G LTE, though no word on whether connectivity will only be available through that carrier. Pricing was also not mentioned in the Tweakers.net report.

According to earlier reports, the Streak Pro also features a pair of microphones, Dell's "Stage 1.5" user interface, and the computer maker's enterprise application stack.

Dell XPS 15z Gaming Notebook

The Dell XPS 15z. You better get ready, because your next gaming laptop is coming, and coming soon. Dell's CEO has just tweeted that the company will have the XPS 15z coming soon, and while it's anyone's guess as to when "soon" is, it has to be sooner rather than later. Is that enough "soon" for you? The company has release a new teaser video showcasing some of the exterior, and whenever Dell puts XPS on a notebook, you know they mean business.

Any speculation as to what internals will be found here? Chances are it'll be one mean, lean gaming machine, whatever happens next.

Dell Precision T1600 Workstation

We've spent a lot of time dissecting boutique gaming desktops, but there are entire other classes of hardware that we only rarely put through their paces. Today that changes with the first in what we hope will be many reviews of workstation-class desktop machines, and we're kicking things off with a mid-range workstation courtesy of Dell: the new Precision T1600.

Designed for low power and high performance and equipped with an entry-level workstation graphics card from NVIDIA, we'll run it through our usual desktop gauntlet along with a couple of extra tests and see what Dell brings to the table.

Dell's Precision T1600 is pretty unassuming, but workstation desktops are exactly that: they're work horses, not show ponies. But inside this Micro-ATX mid tower is a decent amount of enterprise-grade hardware. Dell has made big strides with their new Precision T1600 series. There's the usual generational hardware refresh: the T1600 sports Sandy Bridge-based Intel Xeon processors along with a GF106-based NVIDIA Quadro graphics card. But Dell (not at all unlike HP) has also added a smattering of ISV certifications to this tower, including Autodesk's AutoCAD, Maya, and 3Ds Max. Strangely there's no certification from Adobe, whose production suite would likely benefit substantially from a system like this one. In fact, the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 card in our review unit is one of the frustratingly few cards actually certified for Premiere Pro CS5's Mercury Playback Engine (although anyone with an NVIDIA graphics card, 1GB of video memory, and access to Google can get MPE to work).

Dell Precision T1600 Specifications :
Chassis Dell Custom
Processor Intel Xeon E3-1270
(4x3.4GHz + HTT, 32nm, 8MB L3, 80W)
Motherboard Dell Proprietary Motherboard with C206 chipset
Memory 2x2GB Hynix DDR3-1333 ECC @ 1333MHz (expandable to 16GB)
Graphics NVIDIA Quadro 2000 1GB GDDR5
(192 CUDA Cores, 625/1250/2608MHz core/shaders/RAM, 128-bit memory bus)
Hard Drive(s) 2x Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200-RPM SATA 6Gbps in RAID 0
Optical Drive(s) Optiarc DVD+/-RW Combo Drive
Networking Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet
Intel 82579LM Gigabit Ethernet
Audio Realtek ALC269 HD Audio
Speaker, mic/line-in jacks for stereo sound
Front Side 4x USB 2.0
Headphone and mic jacks
Optical drive
Top -
Back Side 2x PS/2
6x USB 2.0
2x Ethernet
3x DisplayPort (one disabled)
Serial
Speaker, mic/line-in
DVI-D
Operating System Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
Dimensions 6.89" x 16.99" x 14.17" (WxDxH)
Weight -
Extras RAID 0
ISV Certification
Warranty 3-year basic hardware service with 3-year limited onsite service
Up to 5-year available
Pricing Starts at $629
Review system configured at $2,255

The review unit Dell shipped us is fairly beefy compared to its base spec, upgrading to the second-fastest processor they have available (the E3-1280 is 100MHz and $600 more) and the absolute best graphics card the tower ships with.