Nathan Novak gives his impressions of the Dell Latitude XT. Overall it looks like a mixed bag, but not terrible. Personally, performance would be my biggest concern, but for a general purpose machine it probably wouldn’t be too bad. Still, I keep wondering why Dell went with such a slow processor. It’s 2008 after all. 🙂 Nathan points out that the Latitude is missing an up-to-date SATA drive too. Hmm. He also points out that the Latitude pen is missing an eraser button–something that I noticed before and have been quite surprised at.
His overall verdict?
Overall I think Dell did pretty good for their first foray into the tablet world. Sure they need to make some upgrades (SATA hard drive anyone?) but it’s not bad. I wish Dell would make ALL latitudes compatible with the standard docking stations (Lat D430 and XT have to use a custom media bay).
Pricing is a heafty premium compared to the Latitude D430, it’s closest relative. With our corporate discounts our fully loaded D630’s run around $1600. This Latitude XT cost our organization about $2400 (3GB RAM, U7600 dual core processor, pre-N WiFi, Vista Ultimate, 3 year Gold support with CompleteCare).
Am I going to use it as my primary machine? Not right now. We forgot to put the media base and the Bluetooth card on the order (we walked through the specs on the phone with our rep before it was on Dell’s website). I’d also want the slim battery base for travel.
Should you buy one? Maybe. That’s a pretty personal decision. Worst case is you get it, hate it, and return it for a refund (check with Dell on their policies for that). While a tablet is pretty cool to have, for me personally I’ve found that I’m not so sure how often I’d actually use it in tablet mode. But that’s just me.
Thanks for the great review Nathan and great feeedback for Dell.