Product Reviews

There's something unnerving about carrying the Dell Latitude X200 around. With most notebooks, you can feel their weight as a constant reminder of their existence - with this 1.3kg wonder, I found myself constantly checking my bag to make sure it was still there. My fears were doubled by the fact that the chassis measures just 24mm from top to bottom, while its width is a briefcase-friendly 273mm.

But once you open up the Latitude X200 there's little sign of spatial sacrifices. Take the keyboard, for example. The Enter key is full-height, the Backspace of generous proportions, and there's room for the Windows key next to the Ctrl and Fn buttons - even the Pg Up and Pg Dn buttons have separate keys.

Although the screen doesn't fill the lid's full dimensions, its 12.1in viewable diagonal is perfectly adequate for the XGA resolution. And this isn't a bad TFT panel either - it's extremely well lit, and thanks to good contrast and colour handling, the whites appear truly white.

Even when you look at the X200's specifications, there are few indications of compromise. The Ultra Low Voltage Pentium III processor may run at 800MHz rather than the 2.2GHz of Intel's fastest Pentium 4-M chip, but I wonder just how many people need this much power in an ultra portable - Outlook, Excel et al will cope comfortably enough, especially with 256MB of RAM. It even ground through our benchmarks with a respectable score of 0.59.

Only those who want to play games after hours will be disappointed. The Intel 830M graphics chipset, which steals memory from the 256MB of system RAM, can't cope with modern DirectX 8 games, and only limped to 681 in 3DMark2001 SE.

Dell does appear to have half an eye on the after-hours customer, though. There's a 30GB hard disk to provide plenty of storage space for audio, video and other space-hungry files, while a full-sized

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FireWire port makes hooking up a DV camera or external drive simplicity itself. Add two USB ports, a VGA output and the ubiquitous Ethernet and modem ports, and this notebook is surprisingly well connected.

Our only criticisms here are the lack of an infrared port, Wireless LAN and Bluetooth. The latter two may seem like luxuries now, but in 18 months we suspect they'll be a standard inclusion - and there's just one PC Card slot, after all. That said, Dell will fit a mini-PCI 802.11b card for £79.

While we're covering the Latitude's bad points, we should mention battery life. It only just kept going for two hours in our light-use test, while pushing the notebook to its maximum cut this time in half. This isn't a huge surprise, as the battery itself is tiny. This does at least mean you can buy a second battery for £79 without adding too much to your luggage, or you could choose the extended life unit (which increases the weight to 1.5kg) for £106.

One extra that Dell includes as part of this configuration is the excellent media slice (a docking station to the rest of us). This includes two USB ports, plus ports for FireWire, parallel, serial, PS/2, S/PDIF, Ethernet and a VGA output. We also appreciate the DVD/CD-RW combo drive, which is accompanied by a floppy drive. So it doesn't take much to transform this notebook into a fully featured desktop PC at home or work.

Alternatively, you can buy a much more basic version of the Latitude - say with an external CD-ROM rather than the docking station - which will set you back a mere £1,249 (e-Value code 200-L01REV). And that includes a three-year, on-site, next-business-day warranty, just like the reviewed specification here.

Hopefully, you won't need to call on this cover, as the Latitude X200 is well built despite its svelte dimensions. The slate grey chassis may be made of ruggedised plastic rather than magnesium alloy, but it offers plenty of protection to the screen. The only thing it lacks is the stylish finish of a Sharp Muramasa PC-UM10 or Toshiba Portege 2000 (see Labs, issue 91, p92).

Okay, so it's not that glamorous, its battery life is far from amazing, and there's no integrated wireless. But the Latitude X200 weighs a feather-light 1.3kg, is quick enough for all those chore-like jobs most people use ultra portables for, and its price is amazing. Our advice: go to the website and order one now. Just remember to quote Dell's 200-L02REV e-Value code.