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The New Dell XPS 13″ Laptop is a Winner

Posted by Serges LaRiviere on Sat, Mar 17, 2012

Boring, cheap feeling, bulky and lacking necessities like a faster processor and a bigger hard drive; this is how Dell laptops were known. Well, that just changed; it’s as though Dell woke up and caught on to what customers want these days, fewer confusing options, a better design and quality materials.It should be what the customer wants, not what the company feels the customer should have right?

Dell has been working on this design for the last couple of years, since before there was an ultrabook designation for laptops even though this laptop qualifies for that category. The XPS 13 is as thin as most ultrabooks at around 0.7 inches, tapering down to 0.24 inches. The main body is a mix of magnesium-alloy & aluminum along the lid and keyboard deck with a primarily carbon fiber body. This makes the unit quite sturdy and rigid while keeping the weight down to just 3 pounds. The real news here is the small width and depth of the laptop which is accomplished using a bonded edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass display with an extremely thin bezel and the 13.3 inch screen fits into a chassis considerable less wide than most 13 inch laptops.

Dell is looking forward to offering the XPS 13 with Core i3, i5 or i7 processors, a 128GB or 256GB solid state drive and 4GB or RAM. The XPS 13 laptops will have a software package what Dell is referring to as “welcome in the enterprise”. What this means is that it will support custom imaging and BIOS settings, BitLocker and TPM, and will be eligible for Dell’s enterprise support, this is all stuff IT managers look for. The XPS also has Intel’s Smart Connect technology, which periodically wakes up a sleeping PC to refresh network applications like email or Twitter. The cost looks like it will be right around $999. This could be a winner for Dell in the Laptop category, let’s see what the consumers say.