Dell launches a gesture-enabled tablet PC

Dell today shipped the Latitude XT2, a convertible tablet PC with integrated multitouch and up to 11 hours of battery life.

"Multitouch capabilities on the Latitude XT2 allow users to use natural gestures like a pinch or tap for scrolling, panning, rotating and zooming that work with productivity applications they use every day," according to a statement from Dell.

The new tablet's predecessor, the Latitude XT, also offered multitouch, but only through a driver downloadable from Dell's Web site. In the XT2, on the other hand, the multitouch driver from N-trig is built-in.

Dell is also touting the new convertible model as offering up to 11 hours of battery life, with the use of a 6-cell battery along with an additional battery slice.

Priced starting at $2,399, the new tablet comes with choice of an 80 GB or 120 GB hard drive, or 64 GB or 128 GB solid state drive. Other specifications include a 1.2 GHz 9300 or 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor; a built-in keyboard, touchpad, and scroll wheel; a 12.1-inch WXGA display, and support for 1 GB to 5GB of RAM.

A side switch on the XT2 can be used for activating multitouch functions. The screen can be used with either a stylus pen or fingerprint gestures.

The past couple of months have seen a resurgence of sorts in tablet PC activities by vendors. Following the announcement in January of GiiNii's Movit Mini WiFi Android tablet, Archos and Texas Instruments today launched the Android-enabled Internet Media Tablet (IMT). And last week, Fujitsu announced new support in many of its LifeBook notebooks and tablet PCs for AT&T 3G broadband.