I bought a Dell Latitude E4200 for my new boss, as this laptop is light, handy and comes in the beautiful color of deep burgundy red! Not only Apple can make machines with a great design. No, no, seriously, the 12,1 inch ultraportable  benefits from a fast solid-state hard drive (SSD) and it’s weight is about 1,19 KG. The build quality is impressive, with a magnesium-alloy chassis and no obvious areas of weakness.

But before you continue, grab yourself a coffee cup …

The keyboard is full sized, some thing that most netbooks the same size or smaller seems to be lacking. The screen is one of Dell’s first attempts with LED technology. It offers a bright image at the same time as having low power demands, but its colour accuracy and viewing angles were disappointing. The same goes for the two 24″ LED screens I currently have in the office. Also, the combination of a low voltage CPU (1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9400 processor) and integrated graphic chipset gives the computer only a moderate graphics performance. But have in mind, this is not a computer for games or video. Perhaps one of the reasons why the optical drive was dropped. Some people will perhaps also complain on the few USB ports integrated. But on the other hand, they get both eSATA and an ExpressCard slot. More important, this is not a computer for people that needs to run many applications at the same time.

As many laptops and netbooks these days, it comes with mobile broadband integrated as an option. The integrated HSDPA modem is complemented not only by Bluetooth (2.1) and wireless (802.11a/b/g, Draft N), but also a GPS radio and a huge number of security tools: Fingerprint reader and TPM 1.2 chip are both something we take for granted today, but Dell goes the extra mile by offering full-disk encryption and a smart card reader. Problem is only that we don’t support this at work yet.

On the right side of the machine you will find an on/off switch for wireless, but it sadly controls all four radios: WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS and the mobile broadband modem, so you have to control this part of the power consumption with Dell’s ControlPoint software.

wireless-manager

I had quite some problems with getting the integrated mobile broadband modem working. At work we maintain our own Windows Vista image, but does not contain the driver and software for Dell Wireless 5530. Normally that would not be a problem. You only go to Dell’s support pages and enter the machine’s service tag. The service tag didn’t bring up the needed driver, so I had to view at all drivers available E4200 (including models not having the same hardware as the one I had in front of me). That driver was easy to find, and a minute later it was installed. More of a problem was the software for using the mobile broadband modem (the screenshots you see), I found that under XP drivers for Dell Inspirion Mini 10! How on earth should I know that this model had the same modem as E4200? Well, I got great and qualified help from Dell’s Business Support Team.

wireless-manager-connect

Installing the software was then easy, and it is the first time I can say that enjoyed using mobile broadband. Dell’s solution is the first one I have reviewed that comes with a user friendly user interface. It is also the first time I use such a modem that hasn’t been USB based. I highly recommend you to consider buying your laptop with an inbuilt broadband modem and not buy the external ones, even though you are getting them for “free” with a 12 months subscription!

wireless-manager-connected

My conclusion is that this is an incredibly portable laptop, with a great battery life and an ok screen for office tasks and browsing web sites.