from Gizmodo by
Matt Buchanan
While we sorta groaned at the Latitude XT's $2500 base-model pricetag along with everybody else (cause it's expensive!) we didn't piss and moan too much because we knew that the DuoSense technology making it the only input device on the market that combines a pressure-sensitive pen with multitouch into a single surface is new, hot shit. And that's never cheap. But Dell is a little touchy about the feedback, so they've publicly defended the price on their Direct2Dell blog, with a chart showing how much more awesome it is than other tablets and quips like "we are talking about cutting-edge technology here."
The sorta interesting claim about the price itself is that it's only "a slight premium to our competition (emphasis on the word 'slight')," which is based on the math its "non-standard features" only carry a 13 percent premium over the competition. If you're still not convinced it's worth it, they're going to be following it up with more posts explaining why you're wrong.
The problem is that however much it surpasses other tablets, when you come down to it, $2500 is still two-and-a-half grand, and that's just for the base model. You bump the processor to dual core, the RAM to 2GB and expand the hard drive to 80GB, you're talking closer to $3,000 for what's really the acceptable spec configuration. And that kind of money makes most consumers antsy, however fancy your wares. We know we'll be waiting for it to plunge to more plebian prices, though we do appreciate the tech inside, Dell. [Direct2Dell]