Dell Latitude E6400

If you have a company laptop, chances are it's either a Lenovo ThinkPad or a Dell Latitude--both brands are a common sight in cubicles and are capable performers for medium-to-large businesses. (Last year, Dell launched its Vostro line to cater to the smallest of small businesses. Vosto laptops feature essentially the same components as Dell's consumer Inspiron line, plus some administrative software and a special technical support phone number.)

Now the Latitude line is getting a long-deserved makeover, and the most striking break from the traditional gray look is the new black brushed metal design. In a Latitude first, select models will soon be available in Regatta Blue and Regal Red (but not at launch).

The E6400 is powered by Intel's Centrino 2 platform, and our $2,007 review unit was packed with extras, from a backlit keyboard to a desktop-speed 7,200rpm hard drive. In typical Dell fashion, the starting price is a very reasonable $1,139, but almost everything, from the fingerprint reader to the Webcam, to a built-in modem costs extra. That makes the starting price illusory for most buyers, but also lets you customize the system to an incredible degree.

Still, if you don't need business-friendly features such as Intel's vPro platform, a TPM chip, or a contactless Smart Card reader, Dell's Vostro line might be more suited for your needs. And if you do need such features, it's more than likely your IT staff will pick and configure a laptop for you. That being said, Dell has done an admirable job of updating its stodgy Latitude brand, and creating a business laptop that's smart-looking enough to pull double-duty as your personal machine.

The new E series is a stark departure from the familiar Latitude look, trading the tapered gray lid for a sharply squared-off design with an industrial brushed metal surface. The result is a much more modern feel, and it fits in with the usage model of a work laptop being your main machine and frequently traveling from home to office to cafe--the E6400 still has a professional look but can also fit in with high-end designer consumer laptops.

At just less than 6 pounds, the E6400 is a bit heavier than some other 14-inch laptops we've looked at recently, but the solid metal construction gives it an impressively dense feel, and feels like it could stand up to some serious road abuse.

They keyboard's keys felt tight and responsive, and the keyboard didn't flex under our fingers. The optional backlit keyboard ($49) is great, and we wish more laptops were available with backlit keyboards. Perhaps to assuage older business laptop users, there's a ThinkPad-like trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard, along with a traditional three-button trackpoint control set above the regular touch pad (there are also regular left and right mouse buttons below the touch pad). We're still convinced that trackpoints are a legacy product and about as useful to most people as a serial port, but someone must still be using them if Dell made sure to include it in the redesigned Latitude.

Our review unit included several business-friendly features, such as a Trusted Platform Module chip, a contactless Smart Card reader (which lets you just tap your card on the wrist rest, rather than sliding it into a slot), and a fingerprint reader (a $29 option). For many corporate IT departments, these are must-haves. Dell's custom ControlPoint software widget offers a clean, simple one-stop interface for accessing security, power, and networking settings. Other business laptop makers such as Lenovo offer their own similar versions of catch-all administrative applications, and both the Dell and Lenovo versions are reasonable useful and easy to use.

The 14.1-inch wide-screen LCD offers a 1,440x900-pixel native resolution, which is our preference for 14- and 15-inch screens. This is an LED-backlit display, which is thinner, lighter and uses less power than traditional laptop screens, but Dell also offers a non-LED 1,280x800-pixel resolution option, which knocks $129 off the price.

Dell is known for offering highly configurable systems, and the Latitude E6400 is no exception. The base model, about $1,100, still includes the same 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, but trades down to Vista Basic, 1GB of RAM, an 80GB 5,400rpm hard drive and leaves out options such as the fingerprint reader, Webcam, Bluetooth, and even the modem. Dell would probably charge an extra $10 for the right mouse button if it could, but at the same time, it's nice to not be forced to pay for accessories you'll never use.

Our review unit had a Verizon mobile broadband antenna, but AT&T and Sprint versions are also available, each for about $150.

While the Latitude E6400 has the same Core 2 Duo P8400 processor as some other Centrino 2 laptops we've tested, such as the Lenovo SL400, its faster 7,200rpm hard drive helped it get a slight edge in our performance tests. But all the extra security features running on a business laptop can also eat up CPU cycles, so in terms of pure performance, you can take an older CPU and add a ton of RAM and get faster scores--as in the case of the Dell Studio 1535-125B, which has a 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 and 4GB of RAM, twice the memory of the E6400. In hands-on testing, we had no problem multitasking on the Latitude, working on office documents, surfing the Web, and playing back media files simultaneously.

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