At the time of writing, a total of 14 of Dell’s notebooks came with built-in 3G wireless as an option. The Inspiron you see here is one of the more reasonably priced ways to get into mobile email and internet, with the review model we saw costing $2,199 (with 3G). It’s a typical mid-size 15.4in system, a bit heavy on the scales starting at 3kg, but it’s good bang for buck.

Dell offers two official 3G broadband options with its notebooks — Telstra BigPond Wireless Broadband or Vodafone Mobile Broadband. You choose which provider you want during the ordering phase, and your notebook comes with the internal WWAN card preconfigured with that carrier’s firmware. The 3G option costs $300 extra, plus you’ll need to sign up with the carrier for a wireless account as well.

Dell has tested and certified the 3G wireless module to work with two carriers, while at the time of writing Toshiba endorsed Telstra only for its R400 portable. Dell stresses there’s no support if you try using 3G SIMs from other providers, or guarantee that they’ll work.

Non-3D performance is very good for the price. We recorded a PCMark05 score of 5,016, which hammers the Fujitsu S6510 we reviewed.

Battery life was above par at three hours and ten minutes of DVD playback, which you would expect with a 9-cell battery. We found the gloss screen hard to see in low-power mode though.

Under the hood is Intel’s Core 2 Duo T7500, 2GB RAM, an Nvidia 8800M GT (256MB) and a 160GB SATA hard drive. This is a worthy alternative to the Toshiba A200, which was the standout mid-size value-for-money notebook in 2007.