During my visit to Dell's headquarters in Austin, Texas, I've met with Ron Garriques, the President of the company's consumer division for an update on his business.

Since leaving Motorola for Dell, about a year ago, Garriques said he expanded Dell's consumer business, through retail and international expansion and is not too worried about the macro-economic meltdown. Inspite the computer maker making money in the first quarter of this year, Garriques acknowledged that he needs 6 to 12 months to get the "core computer business a healthy business that is robust and repeatable".

At the meeting, Garriques also sees the the PC industry consolidating with the phone industry, the music player industry, etc... pointing to what Apple did with the iPhone, HP its iPaq or Nokia's Tablet PC. "That's where this industry is going to go"!

On the question about Dell's plans to launch a family of connected devices, the answer couldn't be clearer: YES!

"Dell has every intention of participating in all of those different types of devices. I believe in the end that you have to participate in the whole eco-system of all these devices... Once we get that core platform (i.e. the PC business), I don't think there is any barriers to Dell participating in phones, smartphones, MIDs, UMPCs as well as our traditional laptop and desktop business", Garriques said.

Garriques also said that his strategy is not to go to market with undifferentiated products like it did "with some rather undifferentiated products in the MP3 and PDA space".

Dell's President also clarified the Zing acquisition. It was not "just" about making another MP3 player. My guess is that Dell is working on a connected music player a la Microsoft Zune and a smartphone. But the question I'm still asking myself is why? There's not much Dell can add to the iPod line, except perhaps Wi-Fi! But then, Microsoft and Sandisk (who simply rebranded Zing's device as the Sansa Connect that is now discontinued) tried it and failed. Perhaps Garriques, formerly Motorola's cell phone business chief, has probably a few mobile tricks up its short sleeves!

"We bought Zing not to be in the MP3 player space. We bought Zing because we think the PC industry is going from speeds and feeds, which is really what drove this industry for a lot of years to what we call needs and deeds things that you want to do, that you want your computer to go do. And a significant part of that is the solutions in the user interface on top of your PC and how easy is it for your PC and your other connected devices to work together. So the ZIng acquisition for us is a 100+ user interface engineers that help us to make our products easier to use going forward".