Earlier today I wrote about a rumored Dell "mobile Internet device" that might use the Android OS. But this afternoon Dell announced that it would be integrating the "Dell Wireless 700 location solution" into its Mini 10 netbook. The Wireless 700 location solution consists of GPS + triangulation: 

[A]n internal GPS card with built-in Wi-Fi locationing.  These two technologies work in tandem, which means the technology works both indoors and out. In other words, it can calculate your position using Wi-Fi access points or using GPS satellites. The Dell Wireless 700 is powered by Broadcom's A-GPS and Skyhook Wireless' Wi-Fi position solutions.

So what is Dell going to do with this user-location information? Two things to start, turn by turn navigation and a local content portal:

On the software side, the Dell Wireless 700 location system features CoPilot navigation software to provide turn by turn directions. I offers things like 2D and 3D map views, lets you save up to 50 addresses for one trip, offers trip optimization to provide the most efficient route, can provide instant detour information when you encounter expected delays and provides continuously updated information about the trip.

Another piece of the location-based services that we're bringing to market is a location aware portal. For it, we've partnered with Skyhook Wireless and Loki.  Loki is a browser plugin that comes preconfigured for Internet Explorer and Firefox. It works with Loki-supported sites to improve local search functionality by providing you details from nearby restaurants store locations and your friends' location information from supported social media sites like Flickr, Loopt and  BrightKite.

The location aware portal looks like this:

It includes content from a range of partners and sources including Topix, Zvents, Twitter, Yelp, Weatherbug and a number of others. What's interesting here is how Dell is essentially approaching this netbook as if it were a smartphone and equipping it with location-awareness and widgets or apps of a sort with this location dashboard.

However this research from NPD on netbooks found that roughly 60% of the consumers surveyed never took their devices out of the house. But that still means that 40% did.

I think these tools and services reflect some progressive thinking at Dell about the features and use cases of the netbook.