LatitudeOnFlash
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Dell refreshes Latitude E series with latest Intel chips
Targeted at the enterprise, there's plenty of stuff in the Latitude E series (which has been floating around here and overseas, but is finally official) that Joe Consumer couldn't care less about, like "Distributed Device Management" and "Client Configuration Toolkit" to handle massive rollouts of identical computing environments across a company. Still, there's plenty of Latitude left over for those of us with simpler, lower volume tastes. The new E6410 (14.1-inch, pictured) and E6510 (15.6-inch) start at $1,129 and $1,164, respectively, with a rugged version of the 14.1-incher, the E6410 ATG rounding out the crew. All the laptops offer Core i5 and Core i7 processors and DDR3 RAM, with options for discrete NVIDIA NVS 3100M 512MB (non-switchable) graphics and the Latitude ON instaboot auxiliary system. Of course, outside of those basics you can go wild with the configuration options Dell is so well known for. 4-cell batteries come standard on the 1-inch thick systems, but you can ramp up to a 9-cell, or even add on a 12-cell battery slice, and Dell promises roughly an hour per cell with the integrated graphics. The ATG model can be configured exactly like the E6410 outside of a lack of discrete graphics, but adds in MIL spec STD 810G for shock, vibration, temperature, humidity and altitude resistance. Check out a family press release after the break. %Gallery-89986%
Dell adds cheaper Latitude On Flash module to some laptops
Dell's Latitude On quick-boot OS has been available on some of the company's laptops for a little while now, but it looks like Dell has now found a new way to make those laptops boot fast but be more affordable. That comes in the form of Latitude On Flash, which an actual flash module that snaps into a mini-card slot in the laptop and makes use of the laptop's own x86 processor to speed up the boot process instead of a separate ARM chip like current Latitude On systems. While that switch will still give you a boot time of eight to ten seconds, it apparently comes at some expense to battery life -- although we're guessing the lower cost (a $50 upgrade, as opposed to a $199 one) will make that trade-off more than acceptable to most users. Look for the upgrade right now on Dell's Latitude E4200, E4300 and Z laptops -- which, incidentally, also come with an updated Gen 2 interface for the Latitude On OS.
