Dell XPS brand to survive

Posted at: 2:35am 14th May 2008 by James Morris

Despite a widely-linked report in the Wall Street Journal, Dell denies its gaming PC brand is gone

At the start of the week, computing news sites were buzzing with news gleaned from the Wall Street Journal that Dell was killing off its XPS line of gaming PCs in order to concentrate on its Alienware subsidiary. With Dell having recently pulled out of the 2008 Dream PCs labs test (see here for their 2007 entry), the story looked genuine to us as well.

However, we decided to check the truth first, and we’re glad we did. According to a blog posting by Dell consumer product PR representative Ann B Camden, the XPS is far from dead. What is happening is that the XPS design and engineering team is being combined with the group at Alienware to ‘expand [Dell’s] focus on Alienware’. In other words, Alienware will become Dell’s premium high-end gaming brand.

This doesn’t mean XPS will be discontinued, though. As Camden states, XPS is, even now more than a gaming brand. It already includes an all-in-one product, the XPS One, which arrived in the UK a couple of months ago. Then there’s the M1330 ultraportable notebook, and the XPS 420, which is aimed more at multimedia use than hardcore gaming. Camden explains that there will be no early phase-out of any current XPS models, and existing products will continue to be refreshed ‘to keep them on the front edge of gaming’.

That said, you can still read between the lines at what XPS will become over the coming months. Alienware will be Dell’s premium, high-end gaming brand, and XPS looks like it will become a range of stylish, more general-purpose gaming and multimedia PCs, thereby removing the curious competitive overlap between them which has existed since Dell acquired Alienware in 2006.