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Michael Dell’s never met a sound bite hit didn’t want to make, yet when it comes to Ultrabooks, his company’s been playing it cool and quiet, content to wait on the sidelines and size up the competition – until yesterday. Dell finally jumped on the Ultrabook bandwagon late last night with the Dell XPS 13, an ultraportable with – surprise, surprise! – a thin and lightweight build, a quick-waking SSD drive and a long-lasting 8 hour battery. Yeah, the Ultrabook schpiel is yawn-inducing at this point, we know, but Dell’s managed to shove some decent features into the XPS 13.
First up, the WLED display; Dell claims it’s “edge-to-edge” Gorilla Glass humming at a bright 300 nits. As for the resolution, all Dell says in its press release is that the screen is “high definition,” which probably means 1366x768. As expected with Ultrabooks, the XPS 13 is powered by Core i5/i7 processors with integrated graphics and 4GB of onboard RAM. Interaction-wise, the XPS 13 includes a fully backlit keyboard with Chiclet-style keys and a glass touchpad that supports multitouch gestures. There’s a USB 3.0 port, built-in microphones and a webcam, too
Dell’s bundling some extras along with their first Ultrabook, including one year subscriptions to Skype Premium, Computrace LoJack for Laptops Theft Recovery Service and an Accidental Damage Service. While they were at it Dell went ahead and tossed in a free 100GB of Dell DataSafe cloud storage for those folks who find SSDs a bit too confining. And hey, the first 10,000 buyers get a free T-Mobile 4G Mobile HotSpot and 90 days of free mobile broadband service.
There’s no release date info beyond, “The XPS 13 will be available in select geographies around the world in March 2012,” but we know the starting price: $999.
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Holly Golightly
January 11, 2012 at 11:19pm
Wow, okay, those are some pretty nifty features. I definitely was not expecting Skype premium to go with it. I am impressed. The T-Mobile service has broadband caps, but 3 free months of service is not too shabby.
What I was expecting was Dell to make an Adamo tablet finally. I was dissappointed of course. Oh well. There was not much cool in CES this year, other than the TVs. As cool as those TVs are... There is nothing good on TV. Just boring old "reality" shows.
I do not understand the hype behind ultrabooks. Everybody wants a tablet these days. Heck, Microsoft's next OS will be optimized for tablets. What the hell is Dell thinking? Either way, I hope they make an Adamo tablet. Their Adamo line up is top of the line. Best quality one could ever find.
