I had to chuckle when I read the news today that Dell's plan to offer multi-colour laptop has gone awry because of a problem with the paint jobs on the laptop cases.
Last month I received an email from Dell's PR company telling me they had
a "rather frisky looking" Dell Inspiron 1420 for me to test-drive. They couriered it down and the box duly turned up. It was wrapped in stripy, multi-coloured wrapping paper and as I tore into the packaging,
I was wondering whether the laptop within would be bright pink or banana yellow. It was black. Yes, black, just like an IBM Thinkpad, or a Toshiba Portege or a Sony Vaio. Black isn't exactly my idea of a "frisky" colour. So now that whole little episode makes perfect sense. Like Henry Ford with his Model T, the new Dell Inspiron is, for the meantime, only available in black.
For the record, I'd only ever buy a black or silver laptop anyway, the thought of hauling around a colourful laptop doesn't really appeal. But we've seen major design and marketing dollars (the Acer Ferrari and the Asus Lamborghini laptops are just two examples) spent in the last couple of years by companies trying to differentiate their products with new colour schemes. They're all just looking for the success of iPod white.
Anyway, the Inspiron 1420 (offers a pretty good balance of functionality and value.
The laptops are based on Intel's "Sana Rosa" Core 2 Duo processors which I wrote about earlier in the year. They incorporate the latest wireless standard 802.11n which will allow for faster data transfer when you're connected to base stations of the same flavour, are more power efficient and have a feature called Turbo Memory which allows for faster booting up of programs.
At $1649, you get the 1.6GHz Centrino Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive, the Nvidia GeForce 8400M graphics card (this is rather good for gaming and found on the higher-powered Dell XPS laptops too) and Windows Vista Home. Not too shabby a deal at all.
As for the aesthetics, the 1420 hasn't really changed radically from previous Inspiron models in my eyes, but the new textured laptop lid is much nicer and the keyboard certainly feels spacious for the form-factor.
Other models of the 1420 are selling from $1199 but if you're willing to run the resource-hungry Vista operating system and are using multimedia applications splash out on the top-end model, you'll get more life out of it in the long run and $1649 for a laptop with those specs is very good.
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