Dell Latitude E6500 Review
Dell revamped the grey drab look of their Latitude D-family when they launched the new E-series approximately a month ago. The E6400 and E6500 models look to replace the D630 as the mainstream business laptop for companies.
The Dell Latitude E6500 ended up costing $1432 (including tax and S/H) with the following specifications:
- Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz, 1066MHz, 3MB L2 cache)
- 1 GB DDR2-800 SDRAM (1x 1GB)
- 15.4″ WXGA+ LED Screen with built-in 0.3MP VGA webcam (1440×900)
- Intel Integrated Graphics 4500MHD
- 80 GB 7200rpm hard drive
- Dell WLAN 1397 (802.11 b/g)
- Bluetooth, Smart Card
- backlit LED keyboard
- 54 WHr 6-cell battery
- Windows Vista Basic
Design
The overall design of the E6500 is strikingly minimalist with muscular angles, most noticeably with the protruding silver hinges and a beautiful brushed aluminum finish on the cover. The E6500 is offered in a matte finish both outside, inside, and on the keyboard.
The notebook’s structure is extremely strong and stable with a magnesium alloy chassis. There is no detectable body flex when holding up the notebook by one corner.
Front: centered latch
Left side: lock hole, USB port, eSATA port, analog monitor out, heat sink, SD card slot, Expresscard/54, second hdd module.
Right side: 2 USB ports, IEEE 1394 port, SC slot, wifi selector, headphone port, microphone port, PCMCIA slot, optical drive
Rear: Display Port, 10/100/1000 ethernet port, power jack.
Bottom: There has been an emphasis to make a flat, clean bottom on newer laptops. The Vista sticker with the product key is hidden in the battery bay area.
Display
The screen is a matte finish with a horizontal and vertical viewing angle from all possible directions. Dell does off an optional Privacy Filter to reduce the viewing angle. The screen is slightly off center (11m from left side, 14mm from right) but I never conciously noticed it.
I was second guessing myself for not getting the WUXGA screen that I’m normally used to, but after working with the WXGA+ LED screen the color crispness and contrast ratio is amazing.
These pictures are taken at ISO 6000.
Head to head black screen comparison with a Dell Inspiron 6000 (matte screen as well):
Notice the backlight bleeding from the bottom of the Inspiron 6000 screen and the evenness of the E6500 LED screen on the right. The same goes for the status lights glow on the left.
This is a white screen comparison on max brightness.
I had a hard time finding the contrast ratio for the LED monitor so here it is in comparison with other monitors:
- left bottom: E6500 LED screen
- left top: Dell 2007FP, 800:1 contrast ratio
- right top: Dell 2001FP, 400:1 contrast ratio
- right bottom: Inspiron 6000, 300:1 contrast ratio
To be honest I found the LED screen just a tad brighter than my 2007FP.
The 0.3MP VGA webcam I found sufficient, on par with the T61 built-in webcam.
One over-looked feature that I appreciated was the AmbientLight Sensor that will adjust screen contrast and backlit keyboard depending on the amount of light in the room.
Sound
Given that this is a business laptop I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the speakers. While the bass is slightly weak and the music was not as rich as compared to my Inspiron 6000, the sound was significantly better and louder than the T61’s speakers. Also, with the speakers placed beside the keyboard sounds were slightly muffled with the lid closed as opposed to front mounted speakers offered on consumer laptops.
Keyboard, Pointing Stick, and Touchpad
The E6500 has a full sized keyboard with good travel and feedback. I’m a big fan of Lenovo keyboards and the E6500’s is almost as good. This is fairly nitpicky, but I initially preferred a little more texturing on the matte finish. However after using the laptop for a day I’ve gotten accustomed to the keyboard and find it fine as is.
As with most business laptops, it is void of any media keys with the exception of the volume controls. They are unfortunately unlit by either LED or backlight and thus require some pecking to find in the dark.
In addition to Lenovo’s keyboard I also love their Trackpoint, and honestly Dell’s pointing stick doesn’t match up. The T61 comes with spare caps for the Trackpoint, but the E6500 only comes with a single concave cap. Sadly, the pointing stick suffers from the same slickness of their keyboards and thus sensitive mouse movement becomes a little bit more difficult as my finger keeps sliding off.
One way of preventing the finger slip is to use a harder, more textured rubber for the pointing stick cap. Another alternative is to use an “outtie” cap but that may interfere with typing. As it is currently, the pointing stick requires more downward force compared to the Trackpoint to keep the finger in place.
The 3 button mouse was also convenient to use, especially when combined with the pointing stick to scroll in all directions.
The Touchpad also suffers the same problem of being on the slicker side, but in this scenario it is not as important or much of a drawback. One neat feature is the ability to circular scroll using the Touchpad to continually scroll down a page.
Please keep in mind that I am fairly sensitive regarding keyboardsthink many people will find the E6500 just fine, especially if they don’t plan on using the pointing stick.
Accessories
The power brick was a 90W and very slim. You can see the size comparison with the old style 90W and 65W power bricks here:
Also, the power cord is now lighted at the plug end. In addition to looks, its main purpose is to assist troubleshooting to determine whether the laptop battery or power brick has gone bad when having trouble charging.
Battery
I have a 6-cell 54WHr battery and using Intel’s Performance Power Monitor I was able to track my power usage. During web browsing or editting office documents the power fluctuated between 9 – 12W which equals 5hrs 8min battery life on a full charge. At sustained load the power usage was ~16W which gives a battery life of about 3hrs 22min.
If you need more battery life Dell offers a 9-cell primary and a 12-cell slice battery to achieve the advertised 19 hours of battery life.
Software
My E6500 came with an OS recovery CD (rare these days) and three application CDs to reinstall Cyberlink PowerDVD, webcam software, and Dell software.
There is a 2GB recovery partition set aside but I have yet to figure out how to boot to it. Also, the laptop comes with 20GB already used by Vista. I was surprised that the homepage, desktop search, and gadget bar were all defaulted to Google applications. In general there wasn’t much (if any) bloatware to be found:
Performance
SuperPi
+ 000h 02m 19s [ 2M]
HDTune v2.55
Windows Experience Index (WEI)
Heat and Noise
Using an infrared thermometer, the keyboard and palm rests averaged 93º-98ºF. Likewise, the corners on the bottom of the laptop ranged 96º-99ºF with the bottom center hovering ~104ºF.
The laptop is also completely silent when properly cooled. When the intake ports are blocked the CPU fan will spin up to compensate for the increased temperatures but that is to be expected.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
Although Latitude On was initially announced for all E-series laptops, it is only available on the E4200 and E4300.
Pros:
- design
- LED screen
- back lit keyboard
- AmbientLight Sensor
- smart card, fingerprint reader
- eSATA
- Pointing Stick
- Battery life is poor unless you get extended 9-cell battery and/or slice battery
- No Latitude ON
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Comments
No problem. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the Pointing Stick gets stuck and you need to remove the cap to fix it. I’ve gotten used to the sponginess and it’s fine now, but definitely prefer the Lenovo eraser head version more.
This is very informative. More than info, thanks for the high quality images which were not taken in real environment..
Thanks for the review.
I really needed a take on Dell’s pointing device (actually the point was more – do they even have one).