With extremely long battery life, strong performance, stylish looks, and a host of business-friendly features in a lightweight chassis, the 13-inch Dell Latitude E4300 provides a compelling option for highly mobile business users. However, the E4300’s performance and long battery life come at a premium. Though the system starts at $1,549, our configuration came with extras such as an extended battery slice and a high-performance solid state drive, pushing the MSRP of our review unit up to a pricey $2,794. However, if you’ve got the budget, you’ll find few systems with this combination of portability, endurance, and power.
Design
The E4300 is one of the most stylish business notebooks we’ve tested. The polycarbonate and aluminum chassis features a tastefully minimalist design with squared edges, with a handful of blue status lights dotting the top of the keyboard. Our review unit was black, but unlike most business notebooks, the E4300 is available in blue and red. The standard six-cell battery is a blemish on the uniform design, as it not only bulges out uncomfortably from the back, but also is painted in a mismatching silver.
With its lid closed, the E4300 measures 1 inch at its thinnest and 1.3 inches at its thickest points. With the optional battery slice attached to the bottom, the thickness increases dramatically to 2 inches at its thickest. The E4300 weighs a full 5.2 pounds with the slice attached, and 3.8 pounds without it. The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 and X301, by comparison, weigh only 3.3 and 3.4 pounds, respectively, when equipped with their six-cell batteries.
Keyboard, Touchpad, Pointing Stick
The E4300’s full-size keyboard has its keys in all the standard positions. Touch typists who like a highly tactile feel will prefer the Lenovo X300’s springy keys, but can still thrive with the E4300’s decent, if unremarkable, feedback.
Like its main competitor, the E4300 offers both a pointing stick and a touchpad. The tiny touchpad offers little surface area for movement, though tweaking its driver settings made it easy enough to navigate. The pointing stick affords greater accuracy, but its rubber nub is indented in a way that makes it both coarse and slippery at the same time. We found our finger slipping frequently as we tried to move around the desktop.
Display
The 13.3-inch, LED-backlit display offers impressively bright, vibrant images and strong viewing angles. Watching a DVD of Star Wars: A New Hope, we were pleasantly surprised by the trueness of the blacks in outer space scenes and the brilliant fidelity of other colors like the blue sky over Tatooine or the gold metal on C-3PO’s chassis. At half-brightness, the screen was well illuminated; at 100 percent, it was overkill.
Like many 13.3-inch displays with 16:10 aspect ratios, the E4300’s screen has a native resolution of 1280 x 800. However, we would have preferred the larger workspace provided by a 1440 x 900-pixel resolution, something the E4300’s main competitors, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 and X301, both offer.
The E4300 is equipped with an ambient light sensor, which is supposed to make subtle adjustments based on available light, raising the brightness in well-lit rooms to compete effectively with other light sources, while dimming the screen in darker locations to save battery life. Unfortunately, in several well-lit rooms, the hyperactive light sensor annoyed us by continuously raising and lowering the screen’s brightness every few seconds, even though we were sitting still and the overhead lights remained constant. In a darker room, the sensor calmed down and adjusted itself only once, but was still less useful than simply changing the brightness manually. Fortunately, deselecting a box in Dell’s control panel software disables the sensor, a choice we recommend.
