Dell Unveils 2 New Mobile Thin Clients
Dell on Thursday unveiled a refreshed line of mobile thin clients based on the Latitude family of laptops.
The Dell Latitude E7270 and the Dell Latitude 3460 will both be available on Oct. 4. While these new clamshell-based devices are mobile thin clients, the bulk of thin client demand is expected to continue to be for desktop devices, said Dan O'Farrell, senior director of product marketing for Dell Cloud Client-Computing.
"[We have] a lot of flavors of thin clients or what we call zero clients. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for organizations to furnish the right devices," O'Farrell said. Industries in which mobile thin clients tend to be especially appropriate include finance, health care, government, manufacturing and the energy and exploration sector, he said.
The Dell Latitude E7270 is a "corridor warrior" mobile thin client powerful enough for local use of CAD/CAM applications.
The E7270 is the higher-end of the two devices, with enough horsepower to handle local rendering for CAD/CAM applications, while still portable enough with a 12.5-inch screen and a weight of 2.77 pounds. O'Farrell described the device as appropriate for a "corridor warrior," someone who roams to different work areas inside an office complex rather than necessarily leaving the premises with the device.
The Dell Latitude 3460 is one of two new mobile thin clients from Dell that will be available Oct. 4.
The Latitude 3460 is designed for knowledge workers with use cases where it's important for regulatory or legal reasons that the data accessed on the device be locked down, he said.
Both devices will ship with Windows Embedded Standard 7 64-bit. Although Microsoft offers a Windows 10-generation operating system for thin clients, O'Farrell said the Windows 7 version is "the sweet spot for companies right now."
The mobile thin clients are deployable and manageable with Dell's Wyse Device Manager or with Microsoft System Configuration Manager. Dell is also offering Dell Data Protection | Threat Defense as an option for advanced threat protection of the mobile thin clients.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 22, 2016