Dell’s new foray into the smartphone market looks to be a hell of a lot more impressive than you’d expect from a company with a historically lousy industrial design sensibility and lack of software development experience. Information leaked to Engadget reveals that Dell is working on a handful of Android phones, as well as a Windows Phone 7 handset. To a one, they are impressive in design and specs, though two stand out.

A Windows Phone 7 portrait slider, Dell’s “Lightning” (pictured above), features a 4.1-inch OLED display, 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, five-megapixel autofocusing camera, 1GB of flash with 512MB of RAM, GPS, an accelerometer and support for Flash and FM radio.

“Thunder” looks to be Dell’s Android flagship–a touchscreen version of its Lightning sibling. The specs are similar, though it boasts a more powerful eight-megapixel camera, integrated Hulu app and support for onboard photo- and video-editing.

Slick devices, no? They should do much to overcome the antipathy directed by wireless network operators toward Dell’s first smartphone efforts, which were quite a bit duller than the upcoming models.

Could Dell (DELL) actually become a player in the smartphone market?

[Image credits: Engadget]

This time of year, HSN’s generators get switched on two or three times a day. The St. Petersburg company is at the western edge of what meteorologists call Lightning Alley, a 50-mile-wide swath across Florida that gets more lightning than any other place in the U.S. To lose power, or even to have a brief surge or sag in its flow, could create havoc for the high-tech equipment on which the company depends.

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A 37-year-old man was brought to the emergency department at our hospital. He had been jogging in a thunderstorm, listening to his iPod, when an adjacent tree was struck by lightning. Witnesses reported that he was thrown approximately 8 feet (2.4 meters) from the tree.

“The patient had second-degree burns on his chest and left leg. In addition, two linear burns extended along his anterior chest and neck to the sides of his face, terminating in substantial burns in the external auditory meatus bilaterally, corresponding to the positions of his earphones at the time of the lightning strike. Both of his tympanic membranes were ruptured, and he had a severe conductive hearing deficit. He also had a mandibular fracture.”

Yow. Apparently, the iPod’s volume-limit feature doesn’t offer much protection during a 500 megajoule power surge. “Most people hit by lightning get away with minor burns,” Vancouver General Hospital radiologist Dr. Eric Heffernan told the National Post. “It’s because skin is highly resistant and stops electricity from entering the body. It’s called the flashover effect–although it can stop your heart and kill you. … In this case, the victim had earphones on and had been sweating from jogging, so this was a case of disrupted flashover, and the earphones transmitted the electrical current into his head. It’s the first time we’ve had a recorded case of such an incident involving a person wearing headphones, and we think the public should be warned.”

In a separate interview with New Scientist, Heffernan noted that there is no MP3 player brand loyalty when it comes to lightning. “This could have happened with any player, not specifically an iPod,” he said. “There is no increased risk of being struck by lightning when using an iPod–even if you’re listening to heavy metal.”

A 37-year-old man was brought to the emergency department at our hospital. He had been jogging in a thunderstorm, listening to his iPod, when an adjacent tree was struck by lightning. Witnesses reported that he was thrown approximately 8 feet (2.4 meters) from the tree.

“The patient had second-degree burns on his chest and left leg. In addition, two linear burns extended along his anterior chest and neck to the sides of his face, terminating in substantial burns in the external auditory meatus bilaterally, corresponding to the positions of his earphones at the time of the lightning strike. Both of his tympanic membranes were ruptured, and he had a severe conductive hearing deficit. He also had a mandibular fracture.”

Yow. Apparently, the iPod’s volume-limit feature doesn’t offer much protection during a 500 megajoule power surge. “Most people hit by lightning get away with minor burns,” Vancouver General Hospital radiologist Dr. Eric Heffernan told the National Post. “It’s because skin is highly resistant and stops electricity from entering the body. It’s called the flashover effect–although it can stop your heart and kill you. … In this case, the victim had earphones on and had been sweating from jogging, so this was a case of disrupted flashover, and the earphones transmitted the electrical current into his head. It’s the first time we’ve had a recorded case of such an incident involving a person wearing headphones, and we think the public should be warned.”

In a separate interview with New Scientist, Heffernan noted that there is no MP3 player brand loyalty when it comes to lightning. “This could have happened with any player, not specifically an iPod,” he said. “There is no increased risk of being struck by lightning when using an iPod–even if you’re listening to heavy metal.”