Dell Latitude 120L first look

I've been lent, by those wonderful people at Dell UK, a pre-production Latitude 120L laptop. These are due out at the end of the month and are to incorporate the new Intel Core processors. My review model however only comes with a Celeron M 1.5 processor.

My first views are these:

Toughened plastic everywhere. It is very robust, as every surface is made from thick black plastic.

Weight. It's light, very light for it's size. And for a widescreen laptop this is No Bad Thing.

Widescreen. It has a 14.1" widescreen display which works off an Intel 915GM\GMS,910GML Express chipset using 128MB of its own RAM.

Bye bye legacy. Kiss goodbye to parallel, serial and firewire (soon to be dropped by Apple). The only remaining sign that the world as we used to know it existed is the inclusion of a dial up modem. How quaint.
The laptop however does come with 3 USB 2 ports, 10/100 Broadcom LAN, and a stonkingly powerful internal Dell 1370 mini-PCI wireless card. This was picking up my neighbors networks which even Buffalo, D-Link, Intel 2200BG and Centrino chipsets had failed to do!
An External mini-PCI express port also makes an appearance, doing away with PCMCIA.

Uncluttered. You look at this laptop and see just straight, slightly rounded edges, no mass of useless extra buttons which were supposed to add 'functionality'. No ports of various types hanging off the back (indeed there are no ports at all on the back). It has the CD\DVD drive on the right hand size and the USB, LAN, sound ports on the left, and that is all.

Noise levels. It's deathly quiet. No fan noises or cooling sounds. A very pleasant keyboard and left\right buttons that don't go CLICK!


All in all I'm quite impressed. This isn't a top end laptop by any means and as I have previously stated it is a pre-production model and the specs and layout may change before its release at the end of this month, but if you want an affordable, well specced, modern and quiet laptop then take a serious look at this one.

Pictures:

http://edugeek.net/images/120l/dell1.JPG


http://edugeek.net/images/120l/dell2.JPG


http://edugeek.net/images/120l/dell3.JPG


Nice.

<me drools>

I take it that this release may push the prices of the D series down a smidge?

(well, I can hope)

The prices we have talked to Dell about have been very, very competative. Obvoiusly you will have to talk to your area rep about this as we are still to order and have no confimed final prices as of yet.

Can it run Linux? :)

Is it a tough book?

Hehehehehe....

Me.PreferSleekAppleNotebooks