It’s been a couple of weeks since Dell first showed off the Inspiron Duo, and today we’ve gotten some more specifics on the device. The device is notable due to its unique notebook-to-tablet flipping mechanism.

Aside from its flip mechanics, the Duo has the distinction of being powered by a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, making it one of the first dual-core devices in its class. It also comes standard with 2GB of RAM and a Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator for graphics — if anyone has experience with this graphics chipset, please sound off in comments. It’s running Windows () 7 Home Premium, but given Dell’s penchant for customization, there might be options for other flavors of Windows 7 ().

The Dell Inspiron Duo will be available in the first week of December for $550 at its stock price. We’re actually rather intrigued by the device, so we’ll keep an eye on it and let you know how it performs when we get our hands on one.

In a blog post on its Dutch website, Microsoft said that the next version of Windows, Windows 8, is in the works, but that the new operating system will not hit the market for about two years.

The news came at the bottom of a post commemorating Windows 7’s one-year anniversary, and suggests a substantially later deployment date than the one detailed in a leaked slide deck about the forthcoming product earlier this year.

According to the slide deck, the next version of Windows should include a Windows App Store similar to the one Apple unveiled for Mac last week, logins via facial recognition and faster boot-up times. It also cited early 2011 as the intended launch date.

Given that Apple will at minimum release its new Mac OS X Lion operating system by that time, it seems that Windows 8 will have to develop some impressive features to stay competitive.

Yet a three-year gap between operating systems is nothing new for Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has historically taken much more time to develop and deploy new versions of its desktop operating system than Apple. Windows 7 was released a year ago this month, approximately two and a half years after Windows Vista became available to most consumers. There was a five-year gap between Windows XP and Vista, a delay so painful that CEO Steve Ballmer publicly pledged that the company would never again allow such a long period to elapse between releases.