Dell debuts slim ‘MacBook Air’ killers

If you’re in the market for a slim, lightweight yet fully-featured laptop, your choice is about to get a little harder – or perhaps a lot easier. Dell is set to release two new ultra-portables onto the Australian market, and both take a leap ahead of the current standards set by the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300.

Unveiling the 12.1-inch Latitude E4200 and 13.3-inch latitude E4300 at Dell’s launch of its new 2008 line of business notebooks in New Delhi, Michael Dell described the new models as “the best laptops we have ever produced, and at 0.997kg the E4200 is our lighted Latitude ever”.

However, if you read some of the breathless reports floating around the Interweb, you’ll get the impression that these waif-like subnotes will run for 19 hours when fitted with Dell’s optional battery slice. That’s not the case: it’s only the more mainstream Latitudes, equipped with larger 9-cell standard batteries and able to be optioned up with a 12-cell  battery slice, which are capable of hitting that impressive mark.

All the same, with standard issue batteries of between three and six cells plus and an optional 6-cell battery slice, you can expect these sub-notes to run for anywhere from four to twelve hours. Dell’s engineers have also shrunk the AC adaptor from being a power brick to near ‘wall wart’ status (it’s almost the same size as a BlackBerry) and incorporated fast-charge circuitry which can charge the battery to 80% of its capacity in one hour.

The E4200 and E4300 are also among the first ultra-portables built around Intel’s pint-sized Penryn 45nm processor packages rather than the 65nm Merom-based ‘Santa Ynez’ powerplants used by the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300. Introduced as part of the Centrino 2 wave, these are two-thirds the size of the conventional CPU packages and have a faster front side bus, more Level 2 cache and a lower power overhead than their predecessors.

The E4200 foregoes an optical drive and ships with only a solid state drive, with the choice of 64GB and 128GB capacities. Dell will also offer a ‘high-performance’ 64MB drive from Samsung’s RBX family. Unlike the first generation of SSDs (including the one used in the MacBook Air), which are Parallel ATA drives fitted with a Serial ATA bridge chip to feed into a SATA interface, the RBX series uses a native Serial ATA interface for much higher speeds as well as low-power interface states which extend battery life.

Jeff Morris, Dell’s director for Latitude notebooks in Asia Pacific and Japan, says that while the standard SSDs “have performance attributes similar to a 5400 rpm hard drive, the RBX SSDs are faster than a 7200 rpm drive”.

Both the E4200 and E4300 share several traits common to their siblings in the new Latitude line such as the Latitude ON pre-boot Linux productivity environment, backlit keyboard, inbuilt 3G HSDPA, combo USB/eSATA ports, full-frame magnesium alloy construction with all-metal hinges, and highly granular power management software. And in a refreshing change from the rule that business notebooks must be black, these ultra-portables will be available with lids clad in brushed metal, blue and red. Prices, however, are yet to be announced.

David Flynn travelled to New Delhi, India as a guest of Dell.