Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 2515 Battery |
Posted: September 7, 2014 |
Something to note for users that also opted for a package that includes Datasafe is that it will not actually be active until July 15th per a tech support rep I spoke with on July 9th. I was told that my one year of storage would not start until the site goes live, but we will see how that actually works out. The 16.0″ 1080p Full HD RGBLED display is, in a word, gorgeous. Unlike standard LCD technology used in most notebooks, the RGBLED LCD offers richer, deeper colors and excellent contrast that make it ideal for watching HD movies from the built-in Blu-ray player or for editing high-resolution photos from your digital camera.The 1920 x 1080 screen on our review unit looks beautiful from straight on and has fantastic horizontal viewing angles so you can easily watch a Blu-ray movie with three or more of your friends sitting around you. Backlighting was mostly even across the surface of the screen in our review unit. Upper vertical viewing angles are good, but colors did begin to invert at lower viewing angles when the screen is tilted back. That said, unless you plan to view your laptop’s screen from the floor looking up this won’t be a problem. The Studio XPS 13 does a surprisingly good job balancing mobility with solid design and construction. As mentioned above, the Studio XPS 13 takes several design elements from the XPS M1330: the wedge-shaped profile, drop hinge, slot-loading optical drive, and touch-sensitive media buttons are all hallmarks of the XPS M1330. That said, the new Studio XPS 13 is thicker and heavier than the older 13-inch notebook. The one design element I have mixed feelings about is the bottom access panel. Rather than have the typical RAM cover, hard drive cover, and main panel on the bottom of the notebook, the Studio XPS 13 uses a single, massive panel that provides access to all of the notebook at once. While this is helpful for those people who want to make multiple modifications or service their notebook it also means you have to remove 10 screws from the bottom of the notebook just to upgrade the RAM.The 13.3″ WXGA UltraSharp TrueLife WLED display is quite nice, but not nearly as beautiful as the RGBLED display available on the larger Studio XPS 16. Colors and contrast are rather average but viewing angles are surprising good. You won’t have any trouble sharing a DVD or Hulu clip with your friends using this screen. A potential problem for some owners is the fact that Dell only offers the Studio XPS 13 with a “frameless” glossy display … the type that uses a separate glossy protective layer in front of the actual display panel. This gives the screen a very modern look, but the trade-off is a significant amount of reflections on the surface of the screen under strong indoor lights. Outdoors under direct sunlight the screen reflections are so strong it can be extremely difficult to see anything on the screen.At the end of the day the most important parts of a laptop are the internal components that do all the work. Our review unit came equipped with the Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor (2.4GHz) which offers excellent performance in terms of number crunching and video encoding. The 4GB of DDR3 system RAM is enough to satisfy Vista and still provide enough RAM for most needs. The 320GB 7200rpm hard disk drive (HDD) in our review unit offers plenty of storage for most of your entertainment needs.
The big news with the Studio XPS 13 is the inclusion of Hybrid SLI graphics in the form of Nvidia GeForce 9500M GE graphics. Without getting too technical, the Studio XPS 13 essentially includes both low-power integrated graphics and high-performance discrete graphics. When you need the best possible battery life you can use just the integrated graphics, and when you want to play video games the integrated graphics and the discrete graphics combine forces to provide as much video processing power as possible. The synthetic benchmarks listed below will give you some idea of how this system performs compared to other systems on the market.Like its big brother the Studio XPS 16, the Studio XPS 13 generates more lap heat than what we’d like to see. Our review unit gets quite hot whenever the processor or graphics card are working hard. After running multiple benchmarks and watching 30 minutes of a streaming online TV show the Studio XPS 13 got uncomfortably hot on my lap. The heat isn’t horrible, but if you are sensitive to laptop heat then this notebook might be a little too hot to use as a “laptop.” The temperatures listed below are in degrees Fahrenheit.The Dell Latitude E6400 is a 14″ laptop targeted towards businesses that need good performance, solid design, and a commonality of parts for an entire workforce. This notebook competes against such notebooks as the HP EliteBook 6930p and Fujitsu LifeBook S7220. The E6400 offers a wide range of hardware configurations, as well as Solid State Drives (SSDs) for the businesses that require extreme ruggedness and extreme performance. Should your company rush out and purchase the latest generation of Dell business notebooks? We took a closer look to find out. The keyboard is very comfortable to type on, and gave just the right amount of response for each key press. Key travel is similar to most business notebooks with just a bit less clicking sound than what we hear on ThinkPads in our office. The keyboard layout was not cramped at all, and the keyboard backlighting allowed for typing in a dark room. The Alps touchpad has a nice smooth texture and is reasonably responsive, but could be improved. Lag time and accuracy were worse than what we’ve seen on many competing business notebooks. The size of the touchpad surface was large enough for comfortable control and the two touchpad buttons spanned the full length of the touchpad, and each had a soft click when pressed. The touchpoint/trackpoint located in the center of the keyboard is a nice improvement over the touchpoint on the older D630, but again we found the touchpoints on business notebooks from Lenovo and HP to be more responsive and accurate. On the bright side, the touchpoint includes three mouse buttons for better control with tabbed web browsing.Speaking of great locations, it’s also worth mentioning that the fingerprint reader is now located beneath the right speaker. This is a much better location than the palmrest or in between the touchpad buttons (where most manufacturers put the fingerprint reader) because it means you’re less likely to accidentally trigger the fingerprint reader when you pick up the notebook or use the touchpad buttons. Port selection was not a problem, although I would have enjoyed seeing a HDMI port, but the inclusion of a DisplayPort is a reasonable compromise and probably more useful in a corporate environment. Going around the notebook, we find the following portsIn any case, more than four hours of battery life gives you more than enough time for taking notes, surfing the web, or responding to emails throughout the day away from an outlet. For those road warriors who require “all-day” computing, Dell also offers a 12-Cell High Capacity Battery Slice ($399) that connects to the bottom of the E6400. Dell claims the when the E6400 is running on both the 9-cell battery and the 12-cell battery slice it can provide a full 19 hours of battery life. Unfortunately, we didn’t have access to a battery slice for testing, but it’s safe to say that such a configuration would easily produce double-digit battery life with the screen brightness turned down. The Dell Latitude E6400 is a great performer and a solid replacement for the Dell Latitude D630. It seems to be built well enough to be thrown around in day-to-day use, and it’s clear that Dell is trying to improve the Latitude line and offer compelling features … like 19-hour battery life.Our first impressions of the Dell Latitude E4300 were quite positive. The notebook itself has a small LCD bezel and a tightly integrated chassis design, so not only is the notebook rather thin it also presents the smallest footprint that is possible for a 13.3″ notebook. Dell also adopted a much more modern looking design featuring sharp lines and a black finish with the new series. The back of the LCD housing has a brushed aluminum appearance to it, which adds a nice bit of flair to an otherwise safe professional design. While the finish is designed to impress, it is a fingerprint magnet. The black matte finish on the rest of the notebook looks equally sharp, but wears down on and around the edges of the notebook.Build quality is above average, and quite frankly the construction feels ver solid. The base of the chassis is built from magnesium alloy and packed with parts, resulting in a design that protects its internals well. The right palmrest has a little bit too much flex, but there is little to no flex to be found anywhere else on the base of the chassis. Magnesium alloy is also used in the LCD housing, and the screen housing does a really good job of protecting the screen from impacts. We were never able to produce distortions on the LCD screen. The extra bulge at the top of the LCD lid is for the WWAN antenna. While it sticks out only a little bit, that top bulge had just a little bit of give to it. The screen hinges are well built, as the display never wiggles yet provides a comfortable level of resistance to movement. When closing the notebook there is no latch for the LCD, it is held shut by magnetic force. The design provides enough resistance that the notebook is not going to open accidentally, but it is not difficult to open the computer up either.
The keyboard is well supported on the Latitude E4300, and there is very little flex to be found so even violent typers should find themselves at ease with how sturdy the keyboard feels. While other Dell Latitude notebooks have a modular bay design to accomodate an optical drive or hard drive or a weight saver module, Dell choose to build in a fixed optical drive so the E4300 will not support two hard drives. Because upgrading the optical drive is more difficult than it would be with other Latitude notebooks, the E4300 starts with a DVD+/-RW optical drive that is capable of everything a consumer needs except perhaps Blu-Ray capability. Fortunately, a fixed Blu-Ray optical drive is available for a not so low price when ordering the computer. The heavy use of magnesium alloy carries over to the lid of the notebook, which has an attractive “brushed metal” design that isn’t actually brushed metal but rather a painted surface. This immitation brushed metal surface is available in black, blue, or red to give businesses (and their employees) a way to customize the look of their business notebook. The finish itself seems quite durable and should survive years of use and abuse. While there are certainly a lot of reasons to praise the Dell Latitude E4300, the high quality keyboard one of the most prominent reasons. While the layout of the keyboard is slightly different than what can be found in the rest of the Latitude E series, the Dell Latitude E4300 offers the same high quality typing experience as any other Latitude E series notebook with a backlit keyboard. While some Latitude E series notebooks have an option for a non-backlit keyboard, after comparing the backlit versus non-backlit keyboards we can say with confidence that the backlit keyboard offers a superior typing experience. One of the unique features found on the keyboard is, of course, the LED backlights that serve to illuminate the keyboard in dark environments. This backlighting is user adjustable and it can be tied in with the Ambient Light Sensor for automatic backlight adjustments. Like the previous generation of Latitude notebooks, the keyboard provides just the right amount of tactile feedback and firmness while never flexing under stress. The new keyboard design raises the quality bar – it looks and feels like each key has its own distinctive personal space to it and it is almost impossible to accidentally hit multiple keys. Over time, it actually felt like my typing accuracy and speed was improving.
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