I want to take a brief moment and mention a few things that stood out to me about the Dell Latitude E4200 and E4300.
It’s easy to get lost in the specs, but here are some things that jumped out:
– Display Port – replaces HDMI for Dell, new technology (Wikipedia link). It’s another way of connecting your computer to either a computer display or a newer HDTV. It’s got both audio and video running through the single 10.8Gbits connection, and can run through a cable that’s up to around 9 feet (3M) long. It’ll support display resolutions up to 2560×1600. Dell has in fact released two displays that use Display Port -the 30-inch Dell 3008WFP and 24-inch 2408WFP. It is backwards compatible with DVI and HDMI (and even VGA if you have the right adapter). In theory it could lead to slimmer/cheaper displays because of the architecture.
– Blu-ray option on E4300 – not much to be said, now that BR has one, I expect we’ll see more and more of these as optional optical drives.
– Weight is incredible – the E4300 competes with MacBook Air and Lenovo ThinkPad X300 – it’s lighter than the 12″ widescreen Latitude D430 it’s replacing. The E4200 at 2.2 pounds is pretty amazing as well.
– Ultra-Wideband, Bluetooth 2.1, and GPS options and ditching internal modems – it’s interesting, and it’ll send a sign to other laptop makers that UWB will become a standard option, and that modems will slowly fall by the wayside (and given how small USB modems are, it’s not surprising).
– Battery slices for both – should really increase the battery life quite a bit. I’d like to see more ultraportable notebook makers offer battery slices (basically a big battery that attaches to the bottom of the notebook).
– Memory – Guess what, the E4200 goes up to a maximum of 5GB DDR3 memory, and the E4300 goes up to 8GB of DDR3 memory. Don’t ask me what I’d do with 8GB of memory. I guess if you do a lot of system administration, it might be extremely nice to have that memory, plus the new Intel platform in which to run virtual machines.
Kudos to Engadget for releasing all of this information.