Dell XPS M1330

Thursday November 20, 2008

Dell | http://www.dell.com.au

$1499

Price at time of review.

A superb small laptop that offers plenty of features, power and value for money

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Note: The following review comes from PC Authority magazine. For the full Group Test, read the December 2008 issue of PC Authority.

Dell’s XPS M1330 is the cheapest luxury laptop on test by quite a distance. At $1499 for our test configuration, it’s almost $500 less than the Toshiba Satellite P300, and yet it still feels more luxurious than many of the other laptops in this group.

The svelte form hides more than enough power for coping with work and web surfing, and it will cope easily with more demanding apps, too. A 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor, with the help of 2GB of RAM, pushed the M1330 to a score of 1.04 in our 2D benchmarks.

The rest of the spec is as good as you need from a portable, sub-2kg laptop. It has a decent 13in 1280 x 800 resolution screen. Although the graphics chipset is only a mid-range offering, the M1330’s score of 22fps in our low-detail Crysis test suggests it will cope with less demanding titles.

There’s draft-n wireless and plenty of ports and sockets, too: an HDMI output, FireWire socket and a card reader sit with a trio of USB ports, audio jacks and a Gigabit ethernet port.

And this spec results in relatively good battery life. The Dell lasted 4hrs 15mins in our light-use test – one of the best performances this month – although this dropped to 1hr 28mins under intensive use.

The chassis is one of the best of the smaller laptops on test. While there’s some flex in the lid, it isn’t as bad as that in the Asus U6 or Fujitsu Siemens, and the rest of the M1330 feels solid, too.

The keyboard and trackpad are also good. Typing is comfortable, and the trackpad is fast and responsive. Our only niggle concerns the mouse buttons, which feel cheap and flimsy.

For such a small laptop, the M1330 also packs in a surprisingly good screen. It’s one of the best small panels we’ve seen in the Labs this month, offering accurate colours and fine detail.

It’s this, coupled with the M1330’s numerous other qualities – power, portability, battery life and build quality – that make the Dell an ideal portable laptop with features that trump many more luxurious models this month. Add in the tempting price, and it’s clear that it’s well worth its Recommended award.

Price Check: Check out the latest prices for the Dell XPS M1330 at www.dell.com.au

Written by Mike Jennings

2 Comments

This article appeared in the December, 2008 issue of PC Authority.

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Comments

Comments: 2

dogstar428

Nov 20, 2008 10:30 PM

You've reviewed this model right? When I owned one of these there where only two USB ports (a bit manageable, but don't bring too many accessories with you) and 10/100 Ethernet only; not gigabit. According to dell nothing's changed. http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx?c=au&cs=aubsd1&id=xpsnb_m1330&l=en&s=bsd

Comment made about the PC Authority article:
Dell XPS M1330?
A superb small laptop that offers plenty of features, power and value for money

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mrcurlywhirly

Nov 21, 2008 10:50 PM

I agree with the majority of this review, our M1330 performs well, is a compact travel laptop and can even handle DTV broadcasts (if you need that feature) ....however, why is the GPU issue not mentioned? The Nvidia GPU chips used in these laptops have a very high failure rate - this was accepted by Nvidia and has also been recognised by Dell. The only 'fix' offered by Dell is a Bios update which forces the GPU fan to run at high speed constantly. The warranty on our M1330 was extended to 24 months with the second 12 purely covering the GPU. Not mentioning this potential issue is a glaring omission.
Having said all that i would still recommend Dell products, our TFT screen failed while we were on holidays in Scotland, Dell had a tech out to our hotel to replace it the following day, i dont believe there is another company that can offer that level of after sales service.

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