Dell Inspiron 11z

We’ve reviewed a few Intel ULV-powered laptops of late, but none have really been the low-cost ultraportables that these cheap, highly energy efficient processors are supposed to deliver — the Advent Altro, MSI Wind X600 and ASUS UX30 all cost £600 or more.

So, this made us all the more excited to get our hands on the Dell Inspiron 11z. The range starts at a very reasonable £349 for a model with an Intel Celeron ULV processor (as used in the Advent Altro), but we looked at slightly more expensive model with an upgraded dual-core Pentium ULV processor and a bigger battery. Even so, this specification still only comes in at £439, which is far more in keeping with the idea of ‘low cost’ than those other ULV laptops.

‘Thin and light’ is the term that’s often bandied about when talking about ULV-powered ultraportables and while the Inspiron 11z isn’t in the same league as the MacBook Air, it’s still pretty portable. The case is less than an inch deep at its thickest point and the laptop only weighs 1.39kg — light enough to carry around all day with little effort.

The high-capacity battery fitted to our model did spoil the slim profile, though — the cylinder that contains the extra cells pokes from the Inspiron 11z’s underside, and creates an awkward shape for slipping into the padded sleeve of a laptop bag. It also adds a little to the weight, but you may consider the trade-off worth it considering the better battery life it brings.

In BatteryEater Pro’s Classic test, the Inspiron 11z ran for just over three hours, but this shot to well over seven hours in the less-demanding Reader test. Both times are much better than those of the other ULV laptops and it probably means that the Inspiron 11z is good for around five hours of typical use with Wi-Fi enabled, which isn’t bad, but it’s not as good as some of the longer-lasting netbooks we’ve reviewed.

Bulky battery aside, an 11.6” screen means that the Inspiron still manages to be very compact without compromising usability. Lift the glossy lid (available in six colours) and you’ll find a full-size, low-profile keyboard with large, full-size keys. This is very comfortable type on and there’s only a little flex, but the whole thing does feel a little hollow — though is isn’t much of a complaint for a laptop that costs so little.

The large trackpad wide-aspect looks promising too, but these hopes are soon dashed once you start to use it. There are no buttons and instead two bottom corners of the pad work as left and right buttons. The implementation isn’t quite as effective as on the new Apple MacBook, but this particular aspect works well enough.

The problem, however, is that the trackpad is multi-touch, but doesn’t seem to be able to determine what two fingers in contact with its surface are up to. So, when used normally with a finger or thumb resting on a ‘button’ and another finger moving on the pad, the multi-touch sensor either treats this as a two-finger pinch gesture to zoom the screen, or else jumps the on-screen pointer around as flips between detecting each finger. The result is a trackpad that’s pretty much useless and although you can get around the problem by using the same finger for pointing and clicking, you really shouldn’t have to.

Still, at least there are no complaints about the Inspiron 11z’s screen. The 11.6” diagonal has 1366 x 768 resolution and so is subject to none of the window-fitting problems that plague 1024 x 600 displays. Image quality is excellent too, and the LED backlight is bright — though the screen’s glossy coating leads to the usual reflections.

Intel’s Pentium SU4100 processor only runs at 1.3GHz and so its unreasonable to expect much in the way of performance from this ULV laptop. It is a dual-core chip though, which means that it’s much more capable than any Intel Atom and in fact the Inspiron 11z is perfect for running mainstream productivity software and, thanks to the screen resolution, even more demanding applications like Adobe Photoshop.

Integrated Intel graphics and 2Gb of RAM will ultimately limit what you can up to with Windows 7, but this can be upped to 4Gb if you don’t mind dismantling the case. Just be sure top specify the 64-bit version of the operating system if you buy the Inspiron 11z, though — our model was supplied with Windows 7 32-bit and this can’t make use of much more than 3Gb of memory.