COMPUTER product maker Dell Inc. announced last week it will launch in the third quarter in the Philippines its Windows- and Android-based handheld devices as the company inches toward the consumer segment.

The announcement came from a 60-percent year-on-year growth in the solutions and products segment of the Philippine business of the Wilmington, Delaware-headquartered Dell.

Christopher S. Papa told the BusinessMirror after a press briefing late on Thursday that the company will launch its Venue Pro that he claims have seen some 25,000 BlackBerry  users in the United States switching to.

Likewise, the company, according to Philippine country manager Papa, will launch its pocket-sized tablet Streak.

The launch of these consumer products in the Philippines came after Dell announced a 7-percent decline in worldwide consumer revenue to $3 billion in the first quarter “as demand was softer than expected.”

Still, Indonesia branch managing director Andreas Diantoro said the company remains optimistic it can carve a position in the Philippine consumer market dominated by competitors in both smartphone and personal computer tablets.

“We won’t go into a price war,” Diantoro said, as Papa noted that Dell’s tablet Streak would be priced about P27,000 per unit.

“We’re looking at [selling] a couple of thousand [units] in about three months,” Diantoro said.

He explained that the market would continue to move to mobility devices as sales of notebook have gone down by 5 percent worldwide. Diantoro didn’t say where he got his data.

“This is because it’s not an always-on Internet device compared [with] handheld devices.”

Diantoro added that the company’s “decision to go to mobility business is inevitable.”

“We have no choice. We have to get into mobility. It’s [a] very competitive market but we’ll get there.”

Nonetheless, Diantoro said Dell doesn’t consider itself a consumer products manufacturer. “We are an end-to-end solution provider and mobility is [just] one of our offering as we’re into storage and servers.”

The company, however, is still relatively young in the Philippine consumer market for technology products.

Registered in 2009, the Dell Global B.V. Philippine representative office is just one of two major businesses of the company in the country. The other one is a customer service center.

According to the document it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Dell Global B.V. acts as a marketing center.  Papa said they have more than 100 employees in Cebu but the company plans to further expand sales hubs in the Visayas and Mindanao.