Dell Inspiron M301z review

The keyboard is comfortable to type on thanks to its large, reasonably responsive keys. They don’t feel quite as responsive as other ultra-portable keyboards we’ve used, but they’re more than good enough for typo-free typing. The large touchpad feels accurate and supports multi-touch gestures, although the buttons don’t give quite as much feedback as we’d like.

We were disappointed with the quality of the 13.3in glossy widescreen display. It’s reasonably bright, but contrast is poor and colours don’t look very accurate due to the uneven backlight and the tight viewing angles. If you want to connect a better quality external monitor, you could use either the HDMI port or the Mini DisplayPort connector. The M301z is one of the first non-Apple laptops we’ve seen to have this socket which is even tinier than the already compact DisplayPort connector. There are few monitors that have Mini DisplayPort though, so you’d almost certainly need an adapter or a special cable.

If the 500GB hard disk isn’t large enough, you can add more storage using the three USB2 ports, one of which doubles as an eSATA port for connecting even faster external storage. The integrated speakers aren’t very loud and, unsurprisingly, have very weak bass but they sound reasonably clear and don’t distort at high volumes.

The Inspiron M301z is a slender and attractive ultra-portable laptop with surprisingly good Windows performance and reasonably lengthy battery life. It’s inexpensive too at just £529. However, Lenovo’s 13in ThinkPad Edge lasted an hour longer in our battery test yet costs £79 less from Laptops Direct. Its underside does get noticeably warmer than the M301z’s, but if you can live with this then it’s the better deal.