Arm Candy for the Businessman

The Vostro V13 is a complete breakaway from the boring-looking laptops PC makers have been offering us till now.

By Ankush Chibber

If you have been reading business dailies as regularly as I do, you must have come across various news reports about PC manufacturers making a surge for the small and medium business segment (SMB) over the next 5 years.

This is good news for the segment, which was largely ignored by PC manufacturers in the last decade, thanks to better consumer retail and MNC associated opportunities. This is visible in the new crop of product offerings, too. We at Entrepreneur got hold of the Vostro V13 earlier this month—and to say we were taken aback would be an understatement. Laptops in the SMB segment have historically not known to be pleasing to the eye. But the V13 is perhaps the best looking laptop going around today, sans the Dell Adamo from where it gets its form factor. And it comes at a price that’s almost a quarter of the latter.

The V13 is completely covered in aluminum, which means it’s not only very attractive, but also tough as nails. The casing has a brilliant finish and is sleek enough to make Dell’s previous Vostro models seem like they’re from the Jurassic age. The other thing that amazed us was how light and thin it was. The V13 specs out at an amazing 1.6 kgs, and is 17 mm at its thinnest. That is just unheard of in business laptops. The design takes off from the Adamo and as such there are only praises for it. The screen is effectively hinged on a rear side that accommodates the interface ports—USB, Ethernet and the charging port. Now, if you have seen the typical workstation desk at a workplace, you will see how the cables crawl out of an ugly hole to attach themselves to a PC. Well, this rear interface fits right in with it. There are two other slots—an ExpressCard Slot and an SD Card slot—but no optical drive.

The screen is another feather in the V13’s cap. It’s a 13.3-inch WLED display with a matt finish and a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. The trackpad and keyboard are in line with Dell’s pursuit of basic functionality

over pizzazz.Performance-wise, the V13 goes in the direction of netbooks that are using Intel’s CULV processors. Our unit came with a 1.3 GHz Intel Celeron processor that seemed to run workplace applications easily and efficiently. Conversely, the CULV processes ensured optimized battery life of three hours on full tilt. Our V13 came with 2GB RAM and 250GB hard disk. This can be upgraded to 4GB RAM and 500GB of memory, respectively.

For business owners, the V13 offers a good price-performance ratio at around 37K. Plus, it’s perfect for leaving a great first impression.

Tags:
laptop, SMB, Vostro V13