Product Reviews

For our ultra-portable notebooks test in Labs, Shopper October 2005, we set a price limit of £1,200, which excluded some of the lightest notebooks available, such as Samsung's Q30 and the ThinkPad X range. Tiny notebooks are often so expensive that only companies can afford to buy them, but Dell's Latitude X1 is an attempt to bring truly portable computing to the masses.

The Latitude X1 is slightly smaller than an A4 sheet of paper and is extremely light at only 1.14kg with the standard three-cell battery, which provides just over two hours of life. An optional six-cell battery increases battery life to four hours and 40 minutes and adds just 200g to the weight, so it is well worth the investment.

The notebook's slim chassis feels durable. There is some flex in the lid, but the base is solid and the keys have a fair amount of travel despite the notebook's minimal height.

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The X1 also has an accurate touch pad, and the buttons make a satisfying click. The notebook has built-in Bluetooth and FireWire, but only two USB2.0 ports - it has a proprietary connector on the left of the chassis for the standard external DVD+/-RW drive, but we feel the space would have been put to better use with another couple of USB2.0 ports. The notebook's 12.1" widescreen LCD is bright and clear but produces rather dingy whites and has a grainy texture.

The X1 uses the ultra-low voltage (ULV) version of Intel's Pentium M processor running at 1.1GHz, and our review model had an extra 1GB of memory on top of the 256MB already on the motherboard. With such a low clock speed its performance was never going to be spectacular, but the notebook feels fast enough for normal office tasks and browsing the internet.

The notebook's chassis has no fans and so is completely silent, but this comes at a price. The base of the chassis gets very warm even when the notebook is idle, and after running one of our benchmarks, parts of the chassis were too hot to touch. Using the notebook on your lap becomes uncomfortable after a very short time.

This is a tiny and well-made notebook with decent battery life if you upgrade to the six-cell pack. The fact that it gets so hot is rather worrying, though, and our test model doesn't seem to be particularly good value. The 512MB version costs £230 less, and would be our choice for a good-value ultra-portable notebook.