The Dell Latitude E6500 is a glimpse into the future of laptops. With high expandability, configurable and a strong design, it should suit most corporate environments.
Starting at 2.3kg (with the smallest battery option), the all-black Dell Latitude E6500 somehow manages to produce both the sombre design notes of business along with the style of consumer-oriented notebooks. While the plastic/magnesium alloy chassis is all angles, little touches like the blackened brushed aluminium finish on the back push the new Latitude into new directions. A key part of business design seems to be matte, and here Dell delivers. Matte screen, matte keyboard, matte surface, the only thing that really qualifies as gloss is the Dell logo itself — a good thing for usability as the usual cavalcade of fingerprints and obnoxious screen glare are kept to a minimum.
You won’t find the raft of multimedia buttons here either, with only volume up, down and mute buttons being present. You can, however, create your own hotkeys to do the job using Dell’s included software. The usual status lights are along the same plane as the volume buttons, and otherwise things are kept to a minimalist aesthetic. The Latitude E6500 offers navigation options for both trackpad tragics and joystick junkies, including appropriately positioned mouse buttons for both, and a middle button so scrolling is easy with the joystick.
The 15.4-inch matte screen is high resolution, weighing in at 1,920×1,200, a resolution usually reserved for 24-inch stand-alone monitors. Despite this, text is sharp and readable, the extra screen real estate is a boon for those working with CAD, 3D, design or video.It also features an ambient light sensor, this is the second time we’ve seen this technology on a laptop, which automatically sets the brightness of the screen depending on your surrounding light. In high light situations the screen grows brighter, in low light it grows darker. It’s a handy addition that will likely save some extra battery time, and can be turned off if you find it annoying.
Also tied into the ambient light sensor is the keyboard, which can either turn on white backlighting when things get too dark, or simply respond whenever you use the keyboard or mouse. It also means doing work on those long-haul plane trips can be done a little more discretely, without waking up your neighbour by having to turn on the “personal” light above you.Speakers flank either side of the keyboard.
Finally, the power pack has gone on a diet, opting for slim but wide, instead of something you could kill a small child with. This makes it handier to slip inside a carry case and carry with you.Expandability seems to be the byword of the E6500, even sans docking station, as it seems to have almost everything you could possibly need. The requisite fingerprint scanner is there of course, as is the smart card (SC) slot; however, there’s also a contactless area to swipe your SC to the right of the trackpad, as well as three USB ports, an eSATA/USB port, FireWire port, headphone and microphone port, removable DVD+-RW, PCMCIA and Express Card slots, SD card reader, VGA and DisplayPort out, gigabit Ethernet and a modem port.
The Latitude E series sees the launch of a new BIOS that’s comparatively high resolution and mouse controllable, and quite frankly, very nice. Dell wouldn’t elaborate on what powers it, so we resolved to pull the laptop apart and catch a glimpse at the BIOS chip. Despite our best efforts however, we were utterly thwarted by the Dell construction pixies, as we couldn’t figure out a way to completely remove the casing around the motherboard without breaking things.
The hardware spec is decent and Centrino 2 certified. Our review sample was built on a Core 2 Duo T9500, 2GB RAM, Nvidia’s Quadro NVS 160M (256MB, DDR3) GPU, a 160GB 7200rpm hard drive and featured wireless N and Bluetooth. Quadro is Nvidia’s professional graphics range, and the high-speed hard drive also gives it away as a machine more suited to graphics/visual production. Anyone else purchasing the unit as a result (aside from gamers) will find it delivers more than enough power for their needs.
VPro is also included for remote administration (supporting Active Management Technology 4.0), and the Latitude E6500 is the first system we have seen from Dell which the company is offering to ship with Windows Vista 64-bit, with a config allowing up to 8GB of RAM. Our E6500 came very light on pre-installed software, including Roxio DVD Creator, Adobe Flash Player and Sun’s Java. The system also came with Dell’s management software known as “Control Point”, which provides a central terminal for managing all the features of the E6500.
The Dell Latitude E6500 starts at $1300.