Dell Latitude E6400 ATG

There is a slight penalty to pay for such brightness though, as there's a graininess across the display's 14.1 inches. Colour accuracy is a little wayward too, with skintones appearing a touch yellow and unhealthy. Unless you're thinking of doing any serious photo editing, though, it's far from unusable.

As with all Dell laptops, the E6400 ATG is highly configurable, but our model came sporting a selection of the latest Centrino 2 vPro technologies. An Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 heads up proceedings, running at a heady 2.4GHz, and finds itself partnered with 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM. It's a partnership which earnt it 1.24 in our benchmarks - an especially fine result when you consider Dell's claims that the BIOS and drivers on our model are far from finalised.

The rest of the specification is similarly accomplished. A Samsung 64GB SSD drive further boosts the E6400 ATG's rugged credentials, while the latest Intel Wifi Link 5300 chipset serves up wireless networking right up to Draft-N speeds. Our unit lacked an HSDPA modem, but a quick peek under the 9-cell battery reveals an empty SIM slot just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Security features are also to the fore. With a fingerprint reader nestling to the side of the cursor keys, and a SmartCard reader on the laptop's left-hand edge, security is certainly one area in which the Dell doesn't come lacking.

Cast your gaze around the E6400 ATG's edges and its clear that connectivity is beyond reproach too. The Dell has the honour of being the first laptop with DisplayPort to pass through PC Pro's labs, but novelties aside, all the usual suspects are present and correct.

USB, VGA and eSATA lie to the left and an SD card reader hides under the front edge while another FireWire, a PC Card slot and two more USB ports adorn the right. And, going by Dell's US website, it seems that customers will be able to choose between ExpressCard/54 or PC Card slots as they wish - a welcome change from last year's ranges.

The final ingredient for any portable worth its salt is stamina, and even in its pre-production state, the E6400 ATG fares impressively well. Dell's engineers assured us that battery life will improve with final hardware and software revisions, but our unit managed a highly respectable six and a half hours under light usage, and stretched to a hefty 2hrs 28mins under the strain of our heavy use test.

All in all, it's a highly promising debut. Compelling performance goes hand in hand with excellent build quality, and the only question that remains unanswered is that of cost. But, even if the E6400 ATG does command a hefty premium over its non-ruggedised stablemates - and we have a feeling it will - many businesses may see its increased durability as a wiser long-term investment.

We'll be delivering a full verdict once we receive a final production model but, going by what we've seen so far, it looks like Dell's E6400 ATG is set to make the grade.

Author: Sasha Muller