Dell Latitude D430
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Continued From Latitude D430 Review Page 1

The D430 has a 12.1" wide screen display with a resolution of 1,280 x 800 in a matte finish as opposed to the glossy displays popular nowadays. But matte displays offer their own advantages too specially for viewing experience under varying lighting conditions, and at the end it depends on your usage. Dell includes an ambient light sensor with the D430, which automatically adjusts screen brightness according to the surrounding light in your environment. Viewing angles, however are pretty limited.

While an ultraportable like the D430 can't be expected to have many ports and expansion options due to the size constraints, Dell still manages to provide all the important ones. You get a Mic and headphone jacks, a PC-Card slot, a 5-in-1 memory card reader supporting MMC, SD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro & xD cards. Additionally you get two standard USB ports and a third powered one useful for external drives. Also included is a D-Sub port and a 4-pin Firewire port.

Any discussion of Latitude D430's performance can never be complete without highlighting the included Solid State Disk (SSD). Though you can save almost 500 bucks going for a 100GB PATA drive with a sluggish 4200RPM, money spent on 64GB SSD is well worth it in terms of faster boot up and load times and an overall clear improvement in responsiveness.

As a business notebook Dell's D430 is well equipped with security features built around the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM for short, and the integrated fingerprint reader in addition to the availability of a Smart Card reader.

The Latitude D430 joins the growing number of notebooks that come with integrated support for HSDPA (or 3.5G if you may) cellular based mobile broadband. With this you'll no longer be dependant on Wi-Fi hotspots for connectivity and can gain speedy Internet access virtually anywhere.

With a 6-cell battery, Latitude D430 can weigh as low as 3.3 lbs. And provided you choose optimized brightness settings and let your CPU working in a relaxed mode, the 6-cell battery can give you as much as 3 and half hours of away from the mains computing. Start watching a DVD, and the battery lifetime can reduce to 2 hours only. If you don't want to be bounded by this limit, go for the 9-cell extended battery.

A solid offering from Dell, the Latitude D430 manages to impress in all aspects. From the rugged feeling it gives to the great features such as the SSD, the HSDPA connection and the Smart Card reader; to name a few among many more, it speaks of powerful portable computing.

Still, the lack of an integrated optical drive, the slightly bulkier size and the somewhat underpowered processor might cause some users to look elsewhere but for the serious business user who's main concern is to have a notebook that's light, solid and full of connectivity features the D430 hits right on the mark.