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Features

Expandability seems to be the byword of the E6500, even sans docking station, as it seems to have almost everything you could possibly need. The requisite fingerprint scanner is there of course, as is the SmartCard slot; however, there's also a contactless area to swipe your SmartCard to the right of the trackpad, as well as three USB ports, an eSATA/USB port, FireWire port, headphone and microphone port, removable DVD+-RW, PCMCIA and ExpressCard slots, SD card reader, VGA and DisplayPort out, Gigabit Ethernet and a modem port.

A Wi-Fi catcher sits on the right, but as usual it's reasonably useless as it only alerts to the presence of Wi-Fi--not if the signal is strong, or whether it's encrypted. Pulling out the battery reveals a space for a SIM slot, should you choose to have a WWAN (3G/HSPA) module installed though this option is not available for every region.

The Latitude E series sees the launch of a new BIOS that's comparatively high resolution and mouse controllable, and quite frankly, very nice. Dell wouldn't elaborate on what powers it, so we resolved to pull the laptop apart to catch a glimpse of the BIOS chip. Despite our best efforts however, we were utterly thwarted by the Dell construction pixies, as we couldn't figure out a way to completely remove the casing around the motherboard without breaking things.

Although we do strongly suspect that the BIOS may be Linux-based (Everest seems to think it's developed by Phoenix, while everything else says it's Dell), like the upcoming Latitude ON quick-boot operating system. Sadly Latitude ON isn't present here--at the moment, it's only available in the ultraportable Latitude E4200 and E4300 machines.

Present is the ability to turn off pretty much everything in the machine, as well as USB PowerShare--Dell's name for the technology that allows USB ports to stay powered even when the machine is off. You can even stipulate at what battery level to turn PowerShare off.

A new entry we'll see across all laptops shortly is the ability to plug in the powerbrick, keep the battery in, but not recharge it. After the exploding Sony battery fiasco last year that affected many laptops across many brands, airlines got a little tetchy about letting batteries charge up mid-flight. This works around this issue.

The hardware spec is decent and Centrino 2 certified. Our review sample was built on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo T9500, 2GB RAM, Nvidia's 256MB Quadro NVS 160M GPU, a 160GB 7,200rpm hard drive and featured wireless-N and Bluetooth. Quadro is Nvidia's professional graphics range, and the high-speed hard drive also gives it away as a machine more suited to graphics/visual production. Anyone else purchasing the unit as a result (aside from gamers) will find it delivers more than enough power for their needs.

As usual for Dell, a huge variety of hardware options are available--our review unit came in at S$3,936.53 (US$2,634.36), however, a base unit comes in at S$2,456.72 (US$1,644.06), reducing the screen to 1,280 x 800 and the graphics to Intel's X4500. If you really want to go the full monty, you can get a 64GB SSD hard drive for an additional S$1,066.79 (US$713.91), bringing the price of fully "pimped" E6500 to around S$5,003.32 (US$3,348.27). Of course, your prices will vary depending on your negotiations when purchasing on a corporate scale.

VPro is also included for remote administration (supporting Active Management Technology 4.0), and the Latitude E6500 is the first system we have seen from Dell which the company is offering to ship with Windows Vista 64-bit, with a config allowing up to 8GB of RAM.

Our E6500 came very light on pre-installed software, including Roxio DVD Creator, Adobe Flash Player and Sun's Java. The system also came with Dell's management software known as "Control Point", which provides a central terminal for managing all the features of the E6500.

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