Dell officially announced its entry into the smartphone business on Friday, although its initial phone, the Mini 3, will be sold into China and Brazil for now.

Dell officially announced its entry into the smartphone business on Friday, although its initial phone, the Mini 3, will be sold into China and Brazil for now.

The smartphone will run on Android, as expected, and be sold both by China Mobile, and by Claro in Brazil. Dell noted that Claro is owned by America Movil, the largest network in the Americas.

So far, the only picture of the phone that Dell has released shows it as a flat slab of a phone, with no real sense of its size.

Dell did not say whether the Mini 3 would ship into the United States, although, at this point, it seems like a certainty: Dell has already submitted the Dell Mini 3iX to the FCC for approval with AT&T, and Dell has already leaked plans both to The Wall Street Journal and to TechPulse 360. Ron Garriques, who runs Dell Consumer Products Group, also headed Motorola's mobile-phone business.

"Our entry into the smart phone category is a logical extension of Dell's consumer product evolution over the past two years," Garriques said in a statement. "We are developing smaller and smarter mobile products that enable our customers to take their internet experience out of the home and do the things they want to do whenever and wherever they want."

The fact that Dell has already shipped the Mini 3 into Brazil and China would imply that the phone may be designed for the fast-growing economies of the so-called BRIC region, which also includes Russia and India.

Dell also said that it has relationships with Vodafone in Europe, Australia and New Zealand; AT&T and Verizon in the U.S.; M1 and Starhub in Singapore; and Maxis in Malaysia.

Dell has not disclosed the feature set of the Mini 3, although the phone reportedly lacks Wi-Fi, at least in China. The details of the individual phone models will be disclosed when the devices are available in stores, Dell said: for China Mobile, that will be late November; for Claro, the end of the year. The U.S. FCC application shows that Wi-Fi was included.

Dell officials did not immediately reply to requests for commment.