Dell Tablet PCs: From the Latitude XT to Today’s 2-in-1 Laptops

DellOne2One is an independent technology publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Dell Inc. or Dell Technologies, and Dell and Latitude are trademarks of their owners. The domain hosted Dell’s official blog from July 2006, and this page draws on Wayback Machine copies of that blog.

Featured image: Controls on the edge of a Latitude XT. Photo by Long Zheng, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

What did Dell say about its first tablet in May 2007?

Lionel Menchaca’s post “Dell Tablet PC” opened with “There’s been some chatter about a Latitude Tablet PC coming from Dell.” The vlog ran 0:58, played in Flash and was offered as WMV, MP4 and Ogg downloads.

We played the archived Tablet.wmv, a 320 by 240 file of 2,175,031 bytes, and transcribed its audio. Clarke says Dell will enter the market “later this year with a latitude tablet PC” for education, healthcare and corporate buyers.

He calls it “one of the lightest weight, convertible tablets in the marketplace” with “leadership technology in its pen and touch interface”.

The frames show him swiveling the screen of a dark convertible on a table, then holding it in tablet mode with a Windows Vista-style desktop and buttons along the bezel.

Readers answered within hours. One hoped for Wacom pen technology, another asked for an Nvidia graphics option, and a third wanted a “decently priced” convertible with educational discounts. A trackback excerpt from Gizmodo called it “the company’s first Tablet”.

When was the Latitude XT released, and what changed?

Dell announced the XT’s price and availability in December 2007, and the line ran to a third generation. Dates for the XT3 conflict inside Wikipedia, so the table says so.

Why did tablet PCs come and go?

Price and the pen were the first problems. Early Tablet PCs typically cost US$2,000 or more, and a 2011 Computerworld retrospective, as summarized by Wikipedia, blamed that cost and heavy reliance on the stylus for weak consumer uptake.

Windows then absorbed the idea. Vista put tablet support in every edition except Home Basic and Starter, and Windows 7 in every edition except Starter, so a separate tablet operating system stopped being necessary.

The XT had its own trouble. Wikipedia summarizes user reports that the N-trig digitizer connects through an internal USB port, and that plugging in other USB devices often stopped its software from detecting the hardware.

We cannot verify those reports ourselves. Wikipedia’s citations for them date from October 2008, so treat them as user complaints, not a measured failure rate.

How do modern 2-in-1s relate to the XT?

In form, yes. Wikipedia describes a 2-in-1 as a portable computer with features of both tablets and laptops, and says it differs from a plain tablet by running a full desktop operating system with laptop ports such as USB and DisplayPort.

Wikipedia calls 2-in-1s a sibling category to the older convertibles and documents no lineage from the XT.

Mainstream attention came at CES 2011. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X220 Tablet shipped that year, and Microsoft released the first Surface Pro in February 2013.

Wikipedia’s Latitude lists include a Latitude 13 7350 convertible on a 5th-generation Core M and a Latitude 9440 2-in-1. Apple’s Tim Cook compared the idea to a toaster and a refrigerator in April 2012, and Wikipedia says Dell, Asus and Sony have released their own 2-in-1s since 2012.

What should you know before buying a convertible laptop?

Start with the pen. Wikipedia notes that convertibles may pair an active electromagnetic stylus with a resistive or capacitive screen, so confirm which digitizer your model has and whether the pen ships in the box.

My position: buy a convertible only if you will write or sketch weekly. If you mostly type, a standard laptop puts your budget into keyboard, battery and screen instead of a hinge and a digitizer.

Check the exact model’s driver page before paying, and confirm pen support on the spec sheet. Microsoft documents pen devices for Windows 10 and later.

Touch screens collect fingerprints, so keep our guide to cleaning a laptop screen safely nearby. A used convertible may also need the steps in how to fix a slow laptop and our laptop RAM upgrade guide.

For the people who announced the XT, read our One2One video archive and the history of Dell’s 2006 cartoon and early blogging. Linux buyers can compare with Dell and Linux history.

What could we not verify?

A file named XT_pentouch.flv sat in the December 2007 folder of the old media server, and it has no archived video. All 26 Wayback captures of that address, the first from May 2012, are 404 pages, and none of the nine December 2007 posts the archive holds uses it.

The name suggests a pen and touch demonstration, but we will not say what it showed. Wikipedia also lists the XT as released “around mid 2006” while its prose says December 2007, so we rely on the dated May 2007 announcement and the December date.

We did not fetch Dell’s product pages, so the XT price and weight come from a 2007 press report, and we give no battery figures. The XT3 date, the digitizer problems and the multi-touch claim come from Wikipedia, not Dell.

Frequently asked questions

When did Dell release its first tablet PC?

Dell announced a Latitude tablet PC on May 18, 2007. Wikipedia says it released the Latitude XT in December 2007, and a December 11, 2007 report gave a $2,499 base price. Gizmodo’s trackback on Dell’s post called it the company’s first tablet.

Did the Dell Latitude XT support multi-touch?

Not at first. Wikipedia says Dell released multi-touch drivers in July 2008, using N-trig’s DuoSense technology that combines pen, capacitive touch and multi-touch. Dell’s Margaret Franco had already cited the XT’s capacitive touch on March 27, 2008.

Is a convertible laptop the same as a 2-in-1?

Mostly. Wikipedia lists convertible laptop as another name for a 2-in-1, and separates 2-in-1 convertibles, where the keyboard rotates, folds or slides behind the display, from detachables with removable keyboards. A 2-in-1 differs from a plain tablet by running a full desktop operating system.

Can you still watch Dell’s original tablet vlog?

Yes. The Internet Archive holds a playable October 13, 2007 capture of Tablet.wmv, the 0:58 Clarke announcement, in which he says the Latitude tablet targets education, healthcare and corporate buyers. A second file named XT_pentouch.flv has only 404 captures, so we cannot say what it showed.