About as slim as the Adamo and just half a pound heavier, Dell’s new ultra-thin laptop is a PC intended for business users who crave beauty and are willing to pay whatever it takes to get it.
At the basic level, the Dell Latitude Z is a notebook with a 16-inch HD display that runs Intel Core 2 Duo processor and offers a choice of up to two 256 GB solid state drives. It comes with multi-touch trackpad that supports gestures such as pinch and zoom.
But the device goes beyond that to offer some smooth features — a new kind of touchscreen, wireless charging and some solid security features.
Lets start with the touchscreen. Instead of a touchscreen display, the Latitude Z has touch functionality built along the frame of the notebook display. Sliding your fingers vertically along the frame pops up a tool bar that lets you choose common applications like email, photos, and camera.
The Latitude Z has a two megapixel camera that goes significantly beyond the traditional webcam function. Hold your business card in front of the camera and it scans the card and saves the information to Microsoft Outlook contacts. If you have a sheet of paper, you hold it in front of the camera and can choose to save it as a PDF.
The camera also has face-recognition capability. So, if turned on, it can detect when you step away from the computer and automatically lock the machine then.
Other security features include a fingerprint reader and contact less smart card reader so you can lock the computer by just waving your office badge over it.
Another interesting addition to the laptop is new hardware that supports a ‘Latitude On’ mode. The mode promises instant start up and offers always on connection to email, internet, contacts and calendar.
The idea is to bring the functionality of a BlackBerry that promises always synced email and calendar to a PC, says Steve Belt, vice president of business client engineering at Dell.
“We wanted to create something that would be the best of both worlds,” says Belt. “The Latitude On mode is fast and gives users gobs of battery life.”
In the ‘Latitude On’ mode, users don’t have access to all of Windows applications such as word processing and PowerPoint. Instead they can access e-mail and browse the internet with boot up times of less than a second. The trade off also brings with it extended battery life of up to 12 hours, says Dell.
Compare that to the idle mode of the laptop where boot up time can be a few seconds and emails are checked every few minutes. But then the battery life can extend up to two days. To switch back to Windows, users have to press a special power button on the laptop.
These are nifty features but the question is does it deserve the $2000 price tag — more than the Adamo? And if that’s not enough for a sticker shock, accessories such as wireless docking and an inductive charging stand will cost extra.
