Dell Latitude D420 review

Dell's Latitude D420 weighs just 1.5kg and so fits daintily into the ultra-portable laptop category. It's also the first laptop we have seen with a built-in 3G, so you can connect to the internet at broadband speeds wherever you are.

The D420 is incredibly slim and light, yet still manages to feel sturdy. Its size leaves no room for an optical drive, but there are three USB ports, an SD card reader and a PC Card slot. It also comes with a docking station called the MediaBase, which gives you a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, as well as a DVI digital monitor output and both serial and parallel ports for older peripherals such as printers.

It has a touchpad and trackpoint pointing devices, and both are accurate and comfortable to use. The keyboard is also surprisingly good, with keys that have lots of travel and plenty of feedback.

Bright and accurate display

Many home laptops have high-contrast reflective screens, but Dell has stuck with a matte finish for the D420's 12.1in widescreen display. This means it's far less prone to creating distracting reflections in brightly lit places. The display is nice and bright, and our test photos were reproduced well, with reasonably accurate colours and clean whites. Detail in darker areas of the picture wasn't so great though, and the vertical viewing angles were overly narrow.

The D420 uses the Ultra-Low Voltage version of Intel's dual-core Core Duo processor. It runs at just 1.2GHz, but considering the laptop's relatively low processor clock speed, its score of 84% in our 2D benchmarks is impressive. The D420's 1GB of memory can easily run several applications, while the 60GB of hard disk is enough for business documents and a fair few music and video files as well. However, you have to make some compromises in an ultra-portable laptop and the integrated graphics couldn't cope with our 3D benchmarks - Call Of Duty 2 resolutely refused to load up at all.

Well connected

The D420's networking capabilities allow it to connect to just about anything. It has built-in gigabit Ethernet, a modem, Bluetooth and wireless networking, but even if you are nowhere near a hotspot or phone line, you can still connect to the internet using the integrated 3G. Dell offers the laptop with a Vodafone SIM card, but this is welded into the 3G adapter and we can't see an easy way of changing network providers in the future.

Thankfully, the 3G connection works fantastically well. Dell's Mobile Broadband Card Utility shows the 3G signal strength at a glance and you simply have to click the large Connect button to get on the internet. The card supports 3G and the faster HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) network, giving download speeds of up to 1.2Mbit/s, which is on a par with the speed of a typical home broadband connection these days.

If you are out of range of the HSDPA network, the card drops to 3G speed, which has an upper limit of 384Kbit/s. HSDPA worked fine in both central and outer London, but you should check www.tinyurl.com to get an idea of high-speed signal strength in your area. As with all Vodafone mobile internet services, images are compressed, so web pages don't look as pretty as usual, but if you need broadband internet access while on the move, then the D420 is a tempting, if expensive proposition.