Dell Latitude 2110

An update to its well-received Latitude 2100, Dell's latest netbook is more of the same, but with updated internals and a much needed higher resolution screen.

It still retains the same rubberised external coating, giving it a rugged throw-about feel that no other netbook can lay claim to. This is due to its education focus — these netbooks need to survive inside school bags day in, day out for years. While there's no option for a solid-state drive (SSD), we'd imagine more than a few geeks would be interested in putting one in to have the ultimate in throw around, devil-may-care laptops.

It still has the network activity light on the top of the lid as well, to alert teachers to internet usage when the kids should be focusing. We still think this is mostly pointless (especially since the kids will increasingly be connected to something in the future), but no doubt it's there purely to assuage fears that computing is more distracting than didactic.

The input's the thing

The make or break of a good netbook is the keyboard and touch pad, and here Dell does reasonably well. The keyboard is almost perfect, with only the tilde key being a little squashed — even the usual right-Shift shortening isn't in action here.

The touch pad is pleasingly multi-touch, allowing two-finger scroll, pinch zoom and rotate, although as usual the rotate function is unreliable. It can also do chiral scrolling if you're that way inclined, and has a "zoom" zone on the left, allowing you to zoom a page by swiping a finger down. All this is great, but the small size of the touch pad works against the Latitude here, and you may often feel restricted.

Upgrade everything

The base model comes with the newer Atom N470 @ 1.83GHz, 1GB RAM, a 160GB hard drive, a 1024x600 screen, gigabit Ethernet and Windows 7 Starter Edition for AU$649. Swap this out for Ubuntu, and the price drops to AU$589. We find Windows 7 Starter annoying — although the whole point of it is to run light, there are far too many restrictions, down to the ridiculous inability to change the desktop wallpaper. Thankfully, Dell offers other editions — end users will want to opt for Home Premium (an extra AU$102.30) and business/school users will want Professional (AU$133.10) for its domain-joining ability. Both are 32-bit, but considering putting more than 2GB RAM in a netbook won't give huge benefits, we'll give Dell the benefit of the doubt this time for not including the 64-bit version.

Upgrade options are where it's at with the Latitude 2110, with almost everything needing to be added. We'd argue the screen is the most important option though — if you can find a genuine use for a touchscreen laptop you can include one for an extra AU$46.20, but the much more useful 1366x768 upgrade comes in at only AU$6.60 extra. We can't understate how much of a difference an extra 168 vertical pixels makes — many applications that were simply not designed for the lower resolution 1024x600 netbook screens can now be used without hassle.

An extra AU$5.50 will get you a webcam, AU$39.60 will get you a 250GB hard drive, and you can go to a six-cell battery for AU$17.60. Bluetooth is an extra AU$6.60. Unlike the Latitude 2100, there's no colour choice: the 2110 comes in black, and that's it.

Ports are fairly standard, with VGA out, headphone and microphone jacks and an SD card reader, but pleasingly Dell has opted for gigabit Ethernet and there are three USB ports — one more than the usual.

Performance

We long ago gave up performance testing on netbooks — these are things meant for casual web browsing and light office tasks. But what is important is the battery life. Turning off all power-saving features and setting screen brightness and volume to maximum, the laptop stayed alive for three hours and 47 minutes, falling in the middle of the pack for netbooks. Asus and Samsung have competitors that fall around the five- to six-hour mark.

Conclusion

The breadth of upgrades alone make the Latitude 2110 a compelling buy, and the rugged rubber casing will tempt some further. While the battery life isn't on par with the likes of the competition from Asus and Samsung, those who want a throw-about netbook with a high-resolution screen will find the Dell mighty appealing indeed.

Specifications

Connectivity
Network interface	10/100/1000 LAN, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n
USB ports	3
VGA	Yes
Display
Natural resolution (max)	1024 x 600 pixels
Diagonal screen size	10.1 inch
Drives
Primary hard drive	160 GB
General
Dimensions (H x W x D)	39.9 x 265 x 187 mm
Laptop type	Ultraportable
Weight	1.314 kg
Memory
Amt of RAM	1GB
Memory card reader	Yes
Processor
Processor type	Intel Atom
Processor speed	1.83 GHz
Software
Operating system	Windows 7 Starter
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