The Venue Pro was supposed to be out in time for the Christmas rush, and Dell had even been taking pre-orders for the smart phone. However now the company has said that it will not start shipping orders until January.
What will get users's goat is that Dell had informed them that the phones had already shipped. Now it turns out that they were told a creative truth. There was some expectations over the phone. It was only one of two Windows Phone 7 devices which were announced as having a Qwerty keyboard. The other was the HTC 7 Pro. It was supposed to be Microsoft's push to stick Windows Mobile 7 into the corporate world where messaging is very important.
Dell Venue engineering samples turned out to be plagued with bugs. There were problems with the WIFI issues and the SIMs and Dell seemed to have a problem with disappearing stock.
It has been a fairly miserable year for Michael Dell. We guess he will be hoping that things will go a little better for him in 2011. At least he can say to himself that Nokia did much worse.