SINGAPORE: The new Studio line of laptops bridges Dell’s budget Inspiron series and its high-end XPS line.

It aims to provide similar features and performance that’s slightly a notch below the XPS series, without the hefty price tag.

Despite being made mostly of plastic instead of metal, the Dell Studio looks good, with a matte exterior and a glossy finish on its screen and wrist rests.

You can choose from seven colours ranging from pink to green — ours came in tame midnight blue.

You also have the option of adorning the screen lid with patterns.

The notebook has touch-sensitive controls for volume and media playback that glow at every touch.

Overall, it feels well-built and sturdy and it’s a breeze to use if you need to do some serious word processing with the backlit keyboard.

Our only gripe with its aesthetics is that it is a little on the thick side and is a tad heavy at around 3kg when coupled with the higher-capacity 9-cell battery.

The Studio 15 that we tested had an exceptionally bright 15.4-inch LED-based display (native resolution of 1,440x900).

Adding to its sleek looks is a slot-loading DVD burner, which can be upgraded to a Blu-ray reader.

A built-in HDMI port, a definite plus in our books, allows you to view movies on a high-definition display. There’s also a VGA-out for conventional computer displays.

An ExpressCard 54 slot, four USB 2.0 ports, a fingerprint scanner, mini FireWire port, multimedia remote and a built-in card reader are included.

Ethernet, WiFi (802.11b/g/*) and Bluetooth round up its connectivity features. There’s a built-in two-megapixel webcam for out-of-the-box video conferencing.

Our review unit was preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate and features an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.6GHz with 2GB of memory and 160GB of storage.

Performance-wise, the Dell can hold its own, handling gaming, multimedia, as well as Web surfing and word processing with nary a glitch or a sense of sluggishness.

The mid-range ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450 graphics chipset it comes with isdecent for gaming and provides more than enough horsepower for multimedia mavens.

It took an average of 50 seconds to start up and 12 seconds to shut down.

Waking up from sleep mode was fast, at around2 seconds.

Battery life was almost four hours using the 9-cell batteryfor intensive tasks like multimedia playback and wireless networking.

It ships with the six-cell battery as standard, so get the nine-cell battery for more juice on the go, if you don’t mind the added bulk and weight.

As exemplified by the Studio 15, Dell’s new line has attractive pricing (starting at S$1,599), more than ample horsepower for the average user and an extensive list of features and upgradeoptions that will give competitors in its class a run for their money. - TODAY/sh