Monday, September 10, 2007
Dell XPS M1210 Review
Posted by Chris Baxter in "HARDWARE" @ 07:00 AM
It’s In The Box
Let's start off by saying that Dell offers a lot of options for this laptop. To be truthful, Dell offers a lot of options for all of its products, which is something I have always liked about them. If needed, a USB TV tuner can be added to make this laptop a multimedia center monster. Or if you do a lot of presentations on the road, there's a Bluetooth ExpressCard remote control that stores and charges in the ExpressCard slot of the laptop. Say you need to be connected to the Internet everywhere you go. Well you can with optional mobile broadband from providers like Sprint and Verizon. The sky is the limit with this laptop, so it would seem.
This particular laptop was packaged with the following:
Under the Hood
Configuration and customization is also a quality that Dell brings to the table. Besides all the goodies and extras you can buy along with your computer, Dell allows you enough options to pretty much build your own PC from scratch. System price varies with the options and features one chooses, of course.
This particular laptop has the following configuration and features:
So, taking a look a the above features we see that it has a Core 2 Duo 2GHz processor, 2GB worth of fairly fast RAM, and a 256MB video card. That looks like the stats of a decent desktop system to me. The only thing in that list that I find lacklustre is the 5400RPM hard drive, but to be fair Dell does offer a 7200RPM upgrade drive also. So it’s got the inner workings of a desktop PC, but what about the outside? Is it ultra portable or just something that you would rather leave at home? Here are its dimensions:
To put this in perspective, this laptop is slightly larger than an 8x11 sheet of paper. That’s pretty small when you compare it to the standard 15” laptop that is popular these days. At almost four and half pounds, though, it seems a little heavy to me, especially when you are talking about a device that you want to take with you everywhere. The weight is really noticeable when you pick it up. It seems very heavy for something so small. But the fact remains that the M1210 is still two pounds lighter than your average laptop and four pounds lighter than the average desktop replacement laptop.
So how does it fair with its ultra-portable competition? The M1210 is about two to three pounds heavier than the other ultra-portable laptops on the market. Ouch! One or two pounds seem a lot more portable than four pounds does. But in the end, this is about a balance between power and portability, and when you look at it as being as powerful as an eight pound laptop yet the size of a two pound laptop, maybe that little extra weight is acceptable after all.
Figure 1: The Dell XPS M1210 - small yet surprisingly heavy.
