Dell streamlines new Vostro notebooks

Dell recipe for its second generation of Vostro notebooks is "less is more". The Vostros are are ostensibly aimed at the small business market but doing double duty as work/home machines. They also happen to make a solid ‘no frills’ system if you care less for the all-but-mandatory multimedia bells and whistles, and more about being able to spec your own system in almost every way imaginable.

That includes opting for the unit to ship sans OS, in case you want to load up your copy of XP Professional or any other operating system. Dell also allows you to tick the Vista Business box but have the direct vendor do the ‘downgrade’ to XP for you, so the unit arrives with XP preloaded.

The new Vostro notebooks also look a darned sight better than their clunky predecessors, which were bolted onto the same chassis as the Inspiron consumer notebooks and looked, well, a bit sad really. The fresh design sees the Vostro’s fat curves squared off in a pleasing ThinkPad-esque manner, yet without being overtly boxy. A slot-loaded optical drive, which is a relative  rarity in Windows laptops, now graces all the new models, as does Gigabit Ethernet, an ExpressCard/54 slot and even creature comforts such as a a row of touch-sensitive media controls (with blue LED backlighting) and a digital memory card reader.

While Dell has retained the 12.1 inch ultraportable and 15.4 inch mid-size models, the 14 inch Vostro has made way for a more compact 13.3 inch version while a 17 inch machine (due in late May) now heads up the pack.

A smaller 'sweet spot'

Robert Vinokurov, Dell’s regional Vostro director, said the reason for the slight downsize was that “it was so compelling in terms of what we could do in this slightly smaller form factor. The weight starts at 2.1kg, which is 20% less than the old 14 inch unit, because the redesign and a lot of the new technology let us make them thinner and lighter. And the tradeoff in the screen size is very minor. The screen size on a 13.3 is 94% of the size of the 14, so it just seemed to be a fantastic balance between portability and practicality.”

And you can expect to see a lot more Dell notebooks with a similar ‘sweet spot’ screen size. “We see an opportunity to really establish 13.3 as a mainstream option” says Vinokurov. “In the past it’s been a little bit more of a niche offering and even priced at a premium, so people who wanted that form factor had to pay more to get it. This product starts at $999, and that’s really a breakthrough for this form factor.”

Of course, like most Dell systems the 1310 is almost infinitely configurable until you hit your head on the ceiling spec of a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo T9500, 128MB nVidia 8400M GS 64-bit graphics card and the choice between a 320GB hard drive at 5400 RPM or a 160GB drive running at 7200 RPM.

Ports a'plenty (and in the right places)

But it’s not all about the feeds and speeds. Design counts for something, and we’re not talking about arty-farty ‘design’ where things look unique but fail the essential usability test (this is less about ‘form following function’ than an arrogant designer saying saying ‘f*ck function altogether!’).

You see, one thing that impressed about the 13.3 inch Vostro 1310 is not that it’s got four USB ports (although that’s pretty good for a notebook of that size, in fact it’s double what some larger models have), but their locations are sensibly distributed around the chassis.

One USB port is parked towards the back of the 1310’s left side, while three more are found on the right. And although two of those ports are stacked atop the other, the third jack sits a centimetre apart and on a slightly higher plane.

This is one of the most plus sensible USB port layouts we’ve ever seen, as it lets you plug in devices with oversized USB shrouds (such as some wireless broadband modems and many rather porky memory keys). If you think this sounds like inconsequential frippery, you’ve never spent much time on the road or even at your desk with a compact notebook.

Crapware, begone!

We also appreciate that the Vostro models continue to ship without the assortment of trialware which usually clutters up the desktop, hard drive and Windows system folders of almost all consumer notebooks.

That’s logical for a business system, especially when businesses so often fast-load their own customised disk image onto the hard drive. But we reckon many halfway savvy ‘personal’ customers would also love to tick a box on the Dell order page which says ‘No trialware’ for no extra charge. How about it, Dell..?