Dell outs ultra-portable Latitudes for the suits: e4200 / e4300

Actually Dell is outing seven new Latitude models on the live press conference we’re virtually attending. We’ll get the skinny on all of them, but wanted to call attention to the e4200 and e4300. These are Dell’s "ultra-portables" for business and are 12.1- and 13.3-inch displays respectively. These look pretty light: starting at 1 kg or 2.2 pounds thanks to the magnesium alloy chassis. As far as thinness: width: 11.4"/291mm, depth: 8.0"/204mm, and height: 0.79"/19.95mm.

Dell went with the Ultra-Low Voltage flavor of Intel Core 2 Duo under the hood and the smaller model is SSD only: your choice of a high-performance 64 GB or a slower 128 GB. They took an interesting approach on the RAM: there’s a gig on-board and you can drop up to another 4 GB in the open slot. Windows XP Professional is an option as are most of the various Vista editions. The real kicker for some will be the battery options. Dell is offering a 9-cell battery plus a slice battery that, when combined, will net you 19 hours of run-time. Even if they’re overly optimistic on the 19 hours, I’d bet you can get at least 15 of real-world use.

There’s more see and hear, but I’m going back to the press conference… for now, you can catch more specs and info right on Dell’s site. We’ll chime in later with more info and thoughts.

Update: here’s a much better pic of this e4200. Also, these units will get a new feature in a few months: Dell Latitude ON. You’ll have access to e-mail, contacts, calendar, attachments and the web without having to boot up. Sounds like a Linux approach that we’ve seen on other devices. Nice.

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