Dell officially launches project Sputnik this fall!

Jul 19, 2012 10:41 GMT  ·  By

After announcing a collaboration with Canonical to sell laptops in 850 retail outlets across India, starting this Saturday, July 21st, Dell comes now with another major announcement related to Project Sputnik.

Remember Project Sputnik? Officially announced as an experiment in May this year, Project Sputnik was supposed to be an open source laptop targeted for developers, which will run Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Well, guess what?! Yesterday, July 18th, Dell proudly announced in a press release that Project Sputnik will become reality this fall, which will result in a developer laptop based on Dell XPS 13, pre-loaded with the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

Available this fall in selected regions, the Dell XPS 13 laptop will offer a complete client-to-cloud solution to all Linux developers, with software to build "microclouds" on their netbooks, in order to simulate an at-scale environment that can be seamlessly deployed to the cloud.

Regarding the specs of this wonderful laptop, it will have 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7 CPU and a 256GB SSD. Price will be $1,499 and it will be sold in the north American market.

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Image credits: Google
"This project represents the first of many new ideas Dell employees will test with customers or partners through the program, and we look forward to supporting Sputnik to be successful as it becomes a product this fall," said Nnamdi Orakwue, executive sponsor of the Dell incubation program and executive assistant to Michael Dell.

"Since we announced project Sputnik a little over two months ago, we have continued to be amazed by the amount and quality of interest and input we have received."

"By listening to developers, Dell can provide them with solutions and products to help make them more productive and allow for greater innovation," said Barton George, project Sputnik lead and director at Dell's web vertical marketing.

In the press release, Dell also announced new technologies and new partners in order to accelerate customer cloud development and value from big data. For more details please check out the official announcement here.