Continued From XPS M1530 Review Page 1

Talking about the high definition drive, XPS M1530 does have an option for Blu-ray drive, however at a premium of $500. Even though, the Blu-ray drive offers storage capacity as high as 50 gigabytes as well as video quality that really shine against the standard DVD quality, we would hardly recommend it considering that the format war of Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is still in action. However, if you have already configured a model with strong components and are still no short of funds, you can perhaps be one of the early adopters of this next generation technology.

As for our reviewed configuration, you get a slot loading DVD drive, which though looks impressive, but is a little noisy during startup, disk insert or eject stages and may not like the smaller CD's or DVD's you may come across on rare occasions.

Except for being a little short of total number of USB ports available, as well the availability of ExpressCard /54 only, XPS M1530 doesn't miss on anything essential when it comes to ports and expansion possibilities. To be more precise, it has 3 USB ports, a FireWire, memory card reader, HDMI as well as S-Video for the old-fashioned.

The design-first approach has resulted in a cleaner back; all has been nicely placed on the front, left and right side.

XPS M1530, with a Nvidia 8600M GT dedicated graphics card, performs well enough. It will even satisfy the occasional or low budget gamers, and with a Core 2 Duo processor, will definitely be powerful enough for everyday tasks.

With XPS M1530, you get to enjoy a 2.0 megapixel web camera which captures images at much better quality than VGA webcams. Unfortunately the speakers, without a built-in sub-woofer, are just average for a notebook emitting tinny sound. We would have appreciated better quality speakers since this model is more likely to face video DVD's than excel sheets.

A fingerprint reader and Kensington lock slot round up the security features.

As for wireless connectivity, Dell XPS M1530 offers speeds up to wireless draft-N technology. If more is desired, and you can bear $150 extra for it, mobile broadband via Verizon or Sprint is a possibility. Our reviewed configuration is Bluetooth enabled.

XPS M1530 weighs 5.9 lbs with the standard 6-cell battery. This is one of the reasons, besides style elements that many would prefer it over the other 15.4" Dell, Inspiron 1520 that weighs a little over 7 lbs.

The standard 6-cell battery on Dell XPS M1530 can give you anywhere from 2.5 to 3 hours of normal usage with some brightness and power settings applied. The notebook also has an option for a 9-cell battery that can make the notebook survive four hours of usage away from the mains. Again, this would be with the power saver mode. Please note that the 9-cell battery will increase the weight of the machine to 6.4 pounds. However, unlike many other laptop models it will not extend past the rear of M1530 and will rather give a slope to the keyboard that you may find pleasing for ergonomic reasons.

Though, XPS M1530 is not as groundbreaking as the M1330 model. Part of the reason is that it's harder to build interesting notebook pc's in the 15.4" form. Dell, still has accomplished the job pretty well with a model that is thin and light, stylish, has touch sensitive media buttons, dedicated graphics card, multiple video outputs and excellent battery life. Last but not the least, all of that in a not-so-expensive price range.