A Dell notebook that does not resemble a tank? Sounds intriguing! OK, that was mean. But most of the Dells that I have seen are HUGE, people. So this leads me to ponder as to what Dell actually considers to be ‘lightweight’. Just my feelings on the matter. No hard feelings, Dell.

Dell updated its lineup of business notebooks Wednesday with a 2.5-pound (1.13 kilogram) laptop designed for executives making last-minute changes to presentations on airplanes.

The Latitude X1 was designed with business travelers in mind, from its reinforced casing that wards off shifting airline baggage in the overhead compartment to a sealed keyboard that limits the damage caused by coffee spills. Dell (Profile, Products, Articles) reduced the size of the power adapter and battery to get down to a system weight of 2.5 pounds, which makes this system the lightest laptop in Dell’s arsenal.

An optional six-cell battery available with the system will provide up to six hours of battery life, but the system ships with a three-cell battery. The base configuration of the notebook costs US$1,699 with Intel’s (Profile, Products, Articles) Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage processor, 256M bytes of DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory, a 30G-byte hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, Intel’s 802.11b/g wireless networking chip, and a 12.1-inch wide-screen display. [Read the rest]