Dr. Evil invades Dell's keynote

MIKEY DELL SUFFERED a Las Vegas-style celebrity invasion during his morning's keynote. And Mr. Dell had to use all of his charm and hard work by the engineering team in order to keep Dr. Evil at bay.

We would never want to see Dr. Evil complaing on a Dell laptop, now would we...?

One of the reasons Dr. Evil was depressed was the fact that he is using a age-old Toshiba notebook. Naturally he'd cheer up if he were using a Dell product.

Dell's DataStore Online to the rescue

The secret in keeping Dr. Evil under wraps lies under the name DataSafe. In short, it is an application for Dell customers that will save your files on-line, thus keeping the data safe from hardware failures or enabling easier transfer of the files from your old computer to a new one. You can schedule backups at different timeframes, but it will be interesting to see how the software app will work once it gets launched.

We were also treated to the appearance of a guest from Blizzard and the launch of a nice painted notebook, Alienware's Hanger 18, an HTPC machine (AMD Live!) and a brand new XPS system. Michael was also talking all about revolutionary PC cooling it uses, branding it H2C.

Dell may have overlooked the fact that the "revolutionary cooling system" was reviewed on the INQ almost six months ago and Alienware has been shipping it in its own ALX systems for quite some time. In fact, we even saw models which had graphics cards cooled by CoolIT stuff. The machine is pretty impressive other-wise, featuring a bit redesigned case and other off-the-shelf components.

However, the best point of the keynote speech was orientation to ecology issues. If we put aside the fact that ICT industry is one of the dirtiest around, having an ecological initiative certainly help to raise the company profile and enables an ordinary guy to give out a bit.

Basically, Dell launched Plant a Tree action, which basically enables you to pay a small fee out of which 100% will go into planting trees to fight the pollution produced by the higher performing computers.

In general, a low-key keynote which is a trademark of this year's CES. Gates did a disastrous job in his penultimate keynote, Michael Dell did the same. If he only talked about Display Port and Blu-ray for Enterprise, things could have been much different... µ