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Dell Latitude Z600

10.10.2009
You read car magazines for reviews of wheels you want to buy--and of the odd machine that you'd never be able to afford in a million years but can admire from afar. That's the Dell Latitude Z600 ultraslim laptop. Wait--a "sexy" Dell Latitude? It's hardly practical--or economical--but if you're into forward-thinking tech, this portable that starts at around $2000-plus is worth a good longing look. (Our review unit, as configured, sells for a mere $4323 with its ).

First observation: The Z600 is wide and way thin. We're talking a laptop with a 16-inch screen and only 0.57 inch thick (and weighs about 4.5 pounds with the standard 4-cell battery). It defies logic creating a machine this big, yet thinner than many . You'll want to take it everywhere and show it off, but since it has a 16-inch screen, you'll have a tougher time finding a bag it will fit in. (For what it's worth, ultraportables are a whole 0.02 inch thinner.) But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

Grab the Z600, and you'll feel a supple, almost rubbery, black-cherry coating reminiscent of what Lenovo does on some . Open her up, and you're greeted by a 1600-by-900-pixel panel. Along the right side, Dell's TouchEdge LCD sensor technology replaces the need to clutter the machine with many shortcuts (you'll find volume controls parked above the keyboard, plus an instant-on shortcut button--more on the latter in a minute). Just tap an indent near the bottom of the panel, and it pulls up an overlay of application shortcuts. Tap the frame, and it launches whatever program you configure. It works really well.

And the screen's colors are crisp enough with still images. The backlit WLED panel does a great job reproducing the gamut of rich, dark tones like the ocean as well as those of bright, vibrant jungle scenes (think of the sample images in your computer's Pictures folder), and it keeps looking sharp whether indoors or out. Glare is minimal. And 720p video installed on one 128GB solid-state drive (our machine came configured with two SSDs) runs smoothly--a small triumph for the integrated Intel 4500MHD GPU, no doubt.

Under the hood of this test rig: A 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9600 CPU and 4GB of RAM. Aside from the two aforementioned hard drives, these are the kind of guts you'll find in something like an . Now, as much as I'd like to spit out performance numbers, you should keep two caveats in mind. First, this machine hasn't run through the vaunted WorldBench 6 testbed just yet--I had to steal the Z600 away just to give you this deep-dive hands-on. Second, our machine came loaded with Windows Vista Ultimate. Safe bet is that the computer you'd consider buying--assuming you have tons of cash--will come loaded with some flavor of Windows 7. Similarly, it's a little early to provide battery-life test results.

Want to get a little more life out of the machine--or not go into Windows proper? Try Latitude ON, a quick-firing OS that boots in 4 seconds. Not bad considering it runs off a separate ARM CPU, 512MB of RAM, and Linux. Log in and use a 3G WWAN () connection for easy access to e-mail, contacts, and calendar info synced with your Exchange server or over POP. Through it, you can view MS Office documents and PDF files. It's obviously geared for the mobile businessman on the go. And you can also hit the Web.