Dell CEO Michael Dell told a reporter this week at an appearance that his company would be bringing its Android-powered mini 3i mobile phone to the U.S. sometime next year. Dell didn't mention what carrier would be handling the phone, but rumors point to AT&T as the provider.

Jean-Baptiste Su from TechPulse was the journalist that Dell opened up to about the firm's smartphone plans. Su told eWeek that the Android smartphone would hit the U.S. in the early months of 2010.

Dell commented on the smartphone market during his dinner speech saying, "The internet in your pocket ... and new platforms that are coming out are pretty interesting. Some of them resemble things that we're pretty familiar with, in terms of open systems and the ability to compete in an open ecosystem. I think you'll begin to see us show up there, gradually."

Dell also said that since his company had purchased EqualLogic the firm had grown from 3,300 customers to 10,000. Dell also talked about servers saying, "A lot of what goes on in the data center is being gobbled up by servers. We see switching, for example, rapidly collapsing into the servers. You've got virtualized switches, but even the switches that aren't virtualized -- they're now sitting inside blade chassis. Not that long ago, it looked like intelligence was getting sucked out of the server and it was going somehow into the network, but actually now it looks like it's going the other way. The server is becoming the epicenter of the data center, and you're seeing the switches get embedded inside the server. I'm sure there are plenty of other opinions out there."

Dell also said that the purchase of EqualLogic made the company the largest seller of iSCSI SANs and called the category the fastest growing segment of the storage market. Dell also talked briefly about a new machine called the Latitude 2100 that it is marketing to schools.

"It looks like a netbook or notebook, but it's actually a system," Dell said. "It comes on a cart, with a whole bunch of these things. They come in different colors, you roll the cart in, you take them out, give them to the students. You pump them back in, they charge up, they  have the networking all built in. Our sales of this 2100 system have been many times what we thought, and the schools just love it, because it fits their application really perfectly."