Delicious (geotagged).

I plan to do this once a month — as often as the coupon allows.

So I received my new phone about 3 weeks ago now, the Sprint HTC Mogul, AKA the HTC Titan, AKA the HTC PPC-6800. I was excited by the fact that it had Windows Mobile 6.1 and built-in GPS, which is why I sprung for it as soon as I found a deal.

As soon as I received the phone, I updated it to the latest firmware from Sprint, which added GPS support and updated it to Windows Mobile 6.1.

Since I’ve had the phone, I’ve found there is a LOT of information on it, a lot of people ‘hacking’ this phone; even reports of the Titan running Android, (Google’s Linux OS) which is pretty neat. Considering I rely on the phone to make calls and be reachable (especially for work), I don’t know if I’d be willing to suffer the potential downtime of being unreachable while the phone is offline. Even so, there are a large number of apps and support around the standard ROMs that make this phone pretty cool.

Through “normal” use for me — daily amounts of which include about 30 minutes of talking, 10 text messages, checking emails every 30 minutes, alerts every 4 hours or so, and about 1 hour of casual use — this phone appears to last about 36 hours from full to empty battery. I’m very pleased with the battery life of this phone.

Phone Technical Specs

Display: 65K color transflective TFT color LCD. Screen size diagonally: 2.8″. Resolution: 240 x 320, supports both portrait and landscape modes.

Battery: Lithium Ion rechargeable. Battery is user replaceable. 1500 mA. 2100 mA extended battery available for purchase. 4 hours claimed talk time on standard battery.

Performance: Qualcomm MSM7500 400 MHz processor (dual core 400MHz ARM11 application processor and 133MHz ARM9). 64 MB built-in RAM (55 megs available). 256 MB Flash ROM with 155 megs available. 64 megs RAM with 26 free at boot.

Size: 4.33″ x 2.32″ x 0.73″. Weight: 5.8 ounces.

Phone: CDMA dual band digital 800/1900MHz. Data: EVDO rev 0, upgradable later this year to rev A.

Camera: 2.0MP

Audio: Built in speaker, mic and HTC ExtUSB stereo headphone jack. Stereo headset included. Voice Recorder and Windows Pocket Media Player 10 included for your MP3 pleasure.

Networking: Integrated WiFi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.0.

Software: Windows Mobile 6.0 Profession Edition operating system. Microsoft Mobile Office suite including Mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint (view only), Internet Explorer, and Outlook. Also included: Esmertec Java VM, Cyberon Voice Dialing, Pictures and Videos, MSN Instant Messenger, Windows Live, Windows Media Player 10, Solitaire, Bubble Breaker (game), Voice Recorder as well as handwriting recognition. Additional applications: Camera, Wireless Manager, MS Bluetooth software, On Demand (Handmark Express), Adobe Reader LE, Audible Player, link to get Good’s messaging client, Zip (unzipping application), Sprint Software Store, Sprint Music (coming in July), Clear Storage (wipes out all data and resets unit to factory defaults). ActiveSync 4.5 and Outlook 2007 trial edition for PCs included.

Expansion: 1 MicroSD slot. 512 meg card included. Up to 2 gig cards supported.

Since I bought mine OEM, I was missing all of the “X included” from above. In fact, all I got was the phone itself and a charger. Good, I don’t need all of those extra accessories anyway

Pictures of the phone (click to enlarge)

I bought the phone used on eBay, so it came as-is, which means that there were some scuffs on the lower right of the device, and a slight bruise on the LCD (unnoticeable unless you’re looking for it). Also, I can’t get wifi to work at all with the device, so I presume that the internal component that manages wifi is busted. I doubt I would use if it I could though, since I have an unlimited data plan and it’s plenty fast.

Photos taken by the phone

I’m pretty underwhelmed by the camera on this phone. Sure, it’s 2 megapixels, and the flash is pretty rad, but the quality is less than staggering. I took some photos in pitch dark of my white dog, here’s how they turned out (click for original size):

Also tried without flash at work:

Better, but still not great.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect so much from such a tiny camera.

Flickr has a really neat and easy way to upload pictures to it from the camera, just send an email to a special email with the subject the title of the image and the body the description of the image, and it will set those properties accordingly. Pretty neat if you ask me. It even supports geotagging.

The main problem with geotagging on this phone is that the camera application will not automatically geotag; there is no setting to force it to do this. There are some applications that will allow you to geotag on demand (e.g. I just took a photo, let’s apply my current GPS settings to it), or geotag periodically (e.g. every half hour let’s check for new non-geotagged photos and geotag to my current location). Neither of these really work right, so I’m still stalking that “killer app” for geotagging on my WM 6.1 device.

Applications and Games

While I’m still looking for some apps that fit my needs for certain tasks, I did find quite a few helpful apps and fun games that make this device easier to manage. Here are a list of them:

• Skyfire – a rad web browser, best in show currently in my opinion. It doesn’t behave like a normal mobile web browser, instead of dealing with WML or even dumbed down HTML, it takes full pages as they would render in modern computer web browsers and displays them accordingly. In fact, the version of Skyfire I’m using sends user agent “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17″. The zooming and panning behaves very similar to Opera mobile, which is probably as best as you can do. The best part of this browser is that it fully supports javascript AND flash! Proven by watching a Youtube video from the phone (which streams seamlessly), and checking my Google Feed reader. Very amazing piece of software.
• Dashwire – synchronization of contacts, photos, videos, ringtones, text messages, phone bookmarks, and much more. I used this when changing phones from my Treo 700wx; it backed up all photos, contacts and texts and ported them over to the new device in less than 20 minutes. Their web util is pretty rad too, it allowed me to quickly and easily post pictures to my Flickr that were on my phone.
• HHC – HTC Home Customizer – Allows full customization of the Today screen. Very essential, looks a lot cleaner than the vanilla Today screen.
• Multiplayer Championship Poker: Internet Edition – I find this a fun thing to do before I go to bed or am bored.
• Google Maps for Mobile / Microsoft Live Search Mobile – I haven’t decided which of these are better for GPS managed directions and location mapping.
• Windows Mobile Mail (link goes to biased review) – Works really well with Gmail for IMAP usage.

And now the stuff I’m still looking for:

• As mentioned above, I’m looking for a better way to deal with geotagging. It should be a function of the camera application, ESPECIALLY on a freaking GPS enabled smart phone camera.
• A nice, free way to nicely deal with synchronization of calendars. There are a handful of non-free apps out there that will sync with Google Calendar (which is good enough), but none are worth the price in my opinion. At this point, I’d rather not have this feature than pay for it.
• How to turn off this incessant flashing? There’s no easy way to turn off the phone’s “service light”, an LED that flashes every 2 seconds or so to notify you that it has service. This can be quite distracting in a dark room when I’m trying to sleep…
• How to master the vibrations… I never have sound on my phone enabled, so ideally every “notification” would vibrate. For some reason the device isn’t obeying my settings for new texts to vibrate. Still gotta work on this one…

Criticisms

A lot of people will complain that the storage on the device is lacking, and the RAM (64MB) is rather lackluster. Honestly, I still have most of the storage available on my device, and I’m not even using any external storage. I doubt I would ever put music or videos on this device, so for the few apps I have and the 7 days worth of emails, ~256MB is more than enough storage.

Perhaps related to this, the phone itself seems to lock up a few times a week. ‘Lock up’ should be defined as unable to wake. The phone, which should have plenty of battery and is still on (as identified by the signal lights flashing), will not come out of a blank screen “sleep” state. If a call comes through, the screen will turn on, but no inputs will be accepted. So if you press the Answer button while a call is coming in, it will not answer and the call will go to voicemail.

Through asking around, some people seem to think that this is due to certain application usage, and I have personally confirmed that the “Weather Plugin” for the “HTC Home Customizer” (as previously mentioned) seems to have a memory leak in that it will always cause this issue. When not using the Weather Plugin, it appears to only happen when the phone is below 25% remaining battery. I have talked to others with this phone who confirm they have similar issues.

Another thing that appears to aid in not freezing up is using the HHC “X Button” plugin — an app that will actually close a program when the X button is pressed, rather than leave it running in the background. It makes sense that this would be a crashing issue related to the low RAM on the phone, so I’m not really sure why the Windows Mobile developers decided to make it like this. If you tell an application to close, it should close; you should not have to jump through hoops (e.g. go to Settings => Memory => Running Applications => Click Terminate) to close a running app.

So although this issue is pretty annoying, I think I’ve recognized a way for its impact to be minimized.

Conclusion

This is by far the best phone I’ve had to date. This would be only my 2nd smart phone (behind only the Palm Treo 700wx) and my 4th or so Windows Mobile PPC. It really does fail in comparison to the iPhone in function and elegance, and the Android enabled devices for speed and power, but the fact that I can use a stylus is a welcomed fallback for me, and Windows Mobile — while beginning to show its age — I still really enjoy using. The fact remains that all the hype these days is going toward iPhone (not on the Sprint network) and the Android devices (not on the Sprint network either). That being said, I like how small and thin this phone is (comparatively at least), and this is the fastest I have ever seen a Windows Mobile device. This might just be one of the best options for a Sprint plan.

Yet despite my positive experience with this phone, there are still quite a few setbacks, many of which make me want to throw this phone at the wall at times. And until it can do everything I need it to, I can’t really be happy with it.

Score: 7.5/10

Click to see my hi-res Flickr photoset of the Dell Vostro 1500

Build Specifications
I purchased the laptop as a default build, with the exception of the screen, warranty and graphics card. The specs were:

• Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5470 (1.6GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)
• Genuine Windows® XP Home
• 15.4 in Wide Screen SXGA+LCD (1680×1050) Display w/TrueLife™ — Default is the 1280×800
• 1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 DIMM
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GT — Default is the 8400
• 120G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
• Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem
• 8X CD/DVD Burner w/ double-layer DVD+R write capability
• High Definition Audio 2.0
• Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Wi-Fi Mini Card
• 56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
• Get $70 Dell Dollars w/3Yr Ltd Warranty and Next Business Day On-Site Svc — Default is 1 year

Final price: $968.00, with free next day delivery. Shortly after I ordered, Dell was giving away free webcams on the LCD, but my order was too late. Subsequently, they gave me a $50 voucher for the difference. That effectively made the final price $918.00.

As soon as I found a deal, I bought a 2x1GB Memory upgrade, “Patriot 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz CL5 200-Pin SO-DIMM”. Aftermarket RAM is always going to be cheaper than ordering it preconfigured with the notebook. I installed the memory via a guide I found, it was easy, took about 20 minutes from powering the laptop down with 1GB to powering it up with 2GB of RAM. Final price including the RAM upgrade: $972.00.

It’s hard to go from a 12″ to a 15″ notebook, but not nearly as hard as it was to go from a 15″ to a 12″ notebook. The hardest things for me to get used to were the new key sizes and the new key placements on the keyboard. The graphics on my 12″ were very sub-par, so comparatively this laptop performs exceedingly well.

Gaming
So far this laptop has played every game I put on it flawlessly, at full settings. I’ve yet to bring it to a LAN party, but given that it’s more powerful than my desktop in every way, I doubt I will be using the desktop for gaming “because my laptop can’t handle it” anymore. The games I play most often on my PC are

• Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne custom map Defense of the Ancients: Allstars
• Counter-strike: Source

Admittedly not the most impressive game repertoire, but that will change in time.

I was able to adjust the settings to max for every option on Counter-strike: Source. I could notice a slight lag, but I was still getting 40fps easily.

A few times inside of a game, I’ve had my graphics driver fail, which either causes the system to lockup, or revert graphics to 800x600x16 and not allow correction until reboot. This happens so rarely I won’t really know that it’s fixed. I’ve had the same issue on other systems, other graphics cards, other drivers. I’m certain that there will be an updated graphics driver that will fix it and not mention anything about it in the changelog, so it’s almost not even worth mentioning.

Appearance
The Vostro 1500 has a sleak brushed-looking black Magnesium-alloy chassis. This makes it more rigid looking and feeling than the previous plastic chassis of the Inspirons. Unfortunately, this makes the case very sensitive to fingerprint markings, as can be seen in this picture:

No, I didn’t just eat some greasy potato chips and plant my fingers all over this before taking the picture. It’s overly sensitive and shows its markings. This might be a turn-off to some people, not to me.

The latch that holds the lid closed is very cheap and flimsy feeling, and doesn’t come to a snug close. I’ve heard stories of people breaking this off already, and I’m sure (ironically) that it’s not a cheap replacement. Once the lid is closed, there’s a fraction of a millimeter between the screen and the keyboard, just enough so that pressure upon the back of the screen will make it feel like it’s moving toward and away from the keyboard. That’s a little nerveracking, and I feel it detracts quite heavily from the quality of the notebook.

It feels like the hinge that connects the screen to the base is too tight, it’s impossible for me to open the screen from closed position with one hand. This is just a minor annoyance, but it’s constant. Every time I have to put down something in hand #2 to help hand #1 open the screen, I get just a little bit more annoyed at the notebook.

There are some obvious draws to the default specs of the Vostro. It is pretty thick and heavy, and the battery life is less than optimal compared to some other notebooks in its class. I don’t mind it, in fact I prefer it. I’ve had a portable laptop in the past, and frankly I find more use to a decently priced desktop replacement. I guess what I’m trying to say, is if I could get away from paying extra for a lighter, longer-charged, thinner notebook, I would…, and I did. That being said, I was still able to get almost 2 hours of battery life with casual use — more than I’d need.

Administrativa
One of the selling points of the laptop is that it doesn’t come prebundled with Dell’s bloatware. The bloatware never really affected me too much. I ordered the Vostro with Windows XP Home, because I have my student license of Windows XP Pro with which I planned to wipe the hard drive as soon as I received the laptop. I did just that, and found the drivers from Dell’s Vostro 1500 driver page without any problems; every device worked. At some point in the past month and a half, Dell decided to no longer host the Windows XP drivers for the Vostro 1500, now you can only select “Windows Vista 32-bit” as your Operating System. Now this is not to say the drivers they have listed won’t work with Windows XP, it just means that they’re working toward no longer supporting XP on the 1500. This is very discouraging, considering I don’t have a student license of Windows Vista . As of Oct-12th, Windows XP is available again. It must have just been a temporary outage.

Two or three times since I’ve received the laptop, I would get weird BIOS messages, saying something to the effect that “the battery is not found or not supported.” I wish I would have captured this image to find out more about what it means, but since pressing F3 to ignore has been working, I’ve been content with that thus far. Next time I get it, I’ll be sure to capture it and followup with that error message.

Conclusion
This is only the second laptop I’ve owned or used very heavily, the first being my Dell Inspiron 700m. I’m very impressed with the power of the unit, Dell has made it very customizable and upgradable. There are quite a few shortcomings, this is really Dell’s first shot at a Magnesium-alloy chassis. However, I applaud their efforts, and I couldn’t be happier with the result.

Score: 9.0/10

Links of Interest:
My Dell Vostro 1500 photoset at Flickr.com
Dell Vostro 1500 Driver Page at Dell.com
Dell Vostro 1500 Manuals at Dell.com

So after some time using an inferior cheap replacement, I decided I needed to set out and find another Antec Notebook Cooler. Man you never know what you’re missing until it’s gone. So I bought another one used for ~$10.

So if I had to revisit the 9.5/10 score, I’d now give it a 9.0/10, due to its critical weakpoint. Now that I know what can go wrong, I can prevent it from happening again.

I’ve been using it to power my iPod on the go, and listen to it while it is powering. It powers my iPod about 1/4th to 1/2 of the way on my 15 minute drive, enough to listen to at work for about 4 hours. It was really easy to setup and use, and I’m very glad I purchased it.

Overall, for price and ease of use, I’d rate it a 10/10.

Introduction
Let me preface this review by saying I’ve never owned an LCD, nor have I ever owned a 19″ display. I went after this display for a couple of reasons:

• I’ve owned Viewsonic displays in the past and have been very happy with them.
• The price of $160 (after rebates and coupons) was very right
• Comments suggested the refresh was fast enough for no ghosting in video games

Thus far it has surpassed my expectations for being a “cheap” display.

I set my resolution at 1280×1024 @ 60Hz, which is the native resolution.

Technical Specifications

19″ color TFT active matrix SXGA LCD
Display Area: 14.8″ horizontal x 11.9″ vertical; 19.0″ diagonal
Native Resolution: 1280×1024
Contrast Ratio: 550:1 (typ)
Viewing Angle: 160° horizontal, 160° vertical @ contrast ratio > 5:1
Response Time: 8ms (typ)
Brightness: 270 cd/m2 (typ)
Light Source: Long life, 50,000 hrs. (typ)
Panel Surface: Anti-glare
Analog RGB Analog (75 ohms, 0.7p)
Frequency Fh: 30~82kHz, Fv: 50~85Hz
Sync H/V Separated (TTL)
VGA up to 1280×1024 non-interlaced
Dimensions 414mm x 407mm x 219mm (16.3″ x 16.0″ x 8.6″)
Three-year limited warranty on parts, labor and backlight

Gaming
School has been busy, but I was able to test a couple games on this display.

Warcraft 3:
This game performed perfectly, with seemingly less eye strain than on my previous 17″ Viewsonic CRT. Of course, that could be from my new glasses…

Battlefield 2:
Played by my friend, all I could extract from him was “it looks good.”

Of course, I plan to test this more as time allows…

My Personal Thoughts and Opinions
Even though I’ve never owned an LCD, or even a CRT over 17″, I’ve used many. At my work I have a 4×19″ LCD system setup, Kessa uses a 19″ CRT, and Robin uses a 15″ LCD… and of course my 12″ laptop LCD.

The idea was to move to LCDs in order to reduce heat and electricity usage. Since the power outages we had at New Years, I’ve been looking for moderately priced (good quality) LCDs to do this. The first one was located .

Pictures:
How could I have a review with pictures? Click on each for a larger image, or see the album.

That’s one big display, dog.	Quite stylish.
Wow, that’s THIN! And so is the display… . Nice expression, too.	Welcome to your new home, VA902b.
“it looks good”.

Overall I would rate this screen a 10/10. I’ve yet to see a flaw, and quite a buy!

While the 12″ laptop is comprised of a Centrino processor, it will still heat up for long use or cpu intensive activities; i.e. gaming or compiling.

If you’re a man using a notebook, and you wish to someday have kids, it’s very important that the lap is kept cooled. I won’t go into more detail, but you can google why if you wish .

Technical Specifications:

• USB-powered cooler
• USB pass-through connector so USB port is replicated
• Low power consumption
• No battery or power adapter required
• Two double ball-bearing fans
• Very quiet, 25.9 dB(A)
• AQ3 Antec Quality three-year warranty

Heat is drawn away from the laptop with the fans and the aluminum surface of the notebook cooler, than exhausted out of the sides of the cooler.

My Impressions:
Pros: The first thing I noticed about the cooler was the design. It looks sleek, styling and blends in almost perfectly with my notebook. It’s lightweight, easy to use and very comfortable. It didn’t come with a manual, but it really did not need it. It took me about 1 minute to find the power cable (in a small compartment on the device), once it was found it was literally plug and play.

The extended corners would appear to fit any notebooks from 9″ to 19″ displays. I have a 12″ which is on the lowest end of the current spectrum, and it doesn’t feel like the cooler is too big for the notebook.

Cons: The cooler comes with a very short usb power cable to connect to the notebook. The power connector is on the side. This looks to be somewhat poor planning to me. If the notebook has only usb ports on the opposite side, it looks like the cooler would be be fully functional when rotated 180 degrees. However, what if the notebook has no side usb ports, only on the back? This was the case with my last laptop. I guess one would just get an usb extension cable?

There is a blue LED that shines rather brightly out of the side of the unit. I would think this is cool if it didn’t shine directly into the eyes of the person next to me.

The Test:
I setup the system to play Warcraft 3 for 1 hour. After the hour was completed, my lap was still as cool as room temperature. The laptop had done it’s job; it reverted the heat from the lap to elsewhere. This device proposes to cool down the notebook, which is something I don’t care about as much as keeping me cool while I use the notebook. As far as I am concerned, it thoroughly succeeded.

Conclusions:
There are a few minor issues with the cooler, but overall it does a great job and looks great doing it. It looks to be very versatile as far what is supported, and extremely easy to install and use. The price was great for me, and I am very glad that I have this product.

Overall: 9.5/10

See my pictures of the Antec Notebook Cooler.

Anyway, I’ve only been using them for a little bit, but I like them much better than my previous (no headphones). The things that appealed to me most were

• Cable length: 3 m
• Ear coupling: Supraaural (I really don’t like inner-ear headphones)
• High Amazon ratings

I hope these hold up. I took a couple of pictures.

Edit 8/8:
Wow, I’ve never heard bass in headphones before these!

Introduction:
I ordered a Dell 700m Laptop in mid May, 2005. I was first attracted to its sleek looking wide-screen 12″ LCD and light 4.1lb weight, but liked the idea that it was also capable of having plenty of processing power.

Technical Specifications
I ordered my 700m when Dell was having one of its now popular $750 off of $1500 sales. My goal was to go for the fastest processor, best battery and a great warranty. With those in mind, I purchased the following:

Intel Pentium M Processor 755 – 2GHz/400MHz FSB
12.1″ WXGA
256MB RAM
40GB HDD
24X DVD/CD-RW combo
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 for 802.11b/g
65WHr 8-cell Lithium Ion Battery
3 year Economy Plan Warranty

I paid $1177 after the $750 off. Some people would say that it is foolish to order only 256MB of RAM with a system. However, look at the prices that Dell charges for RAM. They conventiently allow you to upgrade to 2GB for only an extra $925 (or $25/month). I then ordered 2 of the 1GB RAM sticks for just over $200 from newegg, putting my total paid amount up to roughly $1400. Installing the RAM was a sinch, it took me two small tools and about a half hour.

Gaming
Simply put, do not expect to use the Dell 700m laptop for gaming. While my configuration has a 2GHz processor (fastest available at this time) and 2GB of RAM (most available at this time), it will still not handle many games appropriately. The reason that it performs poorly on games is because it has a “Intel 855 GM Graphics Controller”, which is very substandard for gaming. There are some things that can be done to make it play games.

Before you do anything, find your driver version. The one that is currently available from Dell.com is 6.14.10.3889, which is considered “alpha” by Intel. Intel offers the latest driver (currently 6.14.10.4308) on their official 855GM chipset page.

I have tested three games with the latest driver on my test system as seen above. I tested Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne Dota-Allstars multiplayer mod, Guild Wars, and Black & White. None of the three are on the 855GM game compatibility list, so they could potentially work or not, neither Intel nor the game vendors have an opinion.

Warcraft 3:
The game performed at almost optimal performance. There was a slight (~100ms) latency issue, but it could have either been caused by the poor performing graphics card, or the wireless connection. However, because this game came out in 2002, and due to the fact that it has a performance cap, I somewhat expected the 855GM to perform optimally, but that wasn’t the case.

Guild Wars:
Guild Wars is a popular MMORPG that came out earlier in 2005. This game has very limited functionality on the 4308 driver and the 855GM chipset. System crashing (blue screen) occurred as well as many graphical errors. One of the major graphical errors was that items would appear incorrectly or would appear at incorrect places.

Black & White:
Black & White is a simulation type game that was released in 2001. I experienced no problems whatsoever with this game. It performed very fast and was error free.

Overall, I wouldn’t expect any game made after 2002 to fully work on this laptop or any with a similar Intel graphics chipset.

My Personal Thoughts and Opinions
While IBM boasts the best battery life on their Centrino laptops, I can’t get past the fact that they don’t have the Windows key and are horribly overpriced. I have used many different kinds of laptops in the past. I’d be lying if I said that this was the best looking laptop I’ve ever had, but it does rate among the best I’ve seen. Frankly I’ve become tired of the expanding size of displays of laptops (17″ is rediculous), and find it refreshing to find a nice small and compact display. I think that 12″ is a perfect size for what I do on this laptop. I keep the display at 1280×800 and the display is very clear and crisp.

I actually did not know that it had a build-in SD/MMC card reader on it, but I have found it VERY useful. Prior to getting this laptop, I was considering buying a USB2 memory card reader, because transferring is very slow with the USB1 connecters for my digital camera or PocketPC.

My major complaint about this laptop would be its awkward keyboard layout. The “,”, “.” and “/” keys share the width of 2 regular keys, so it’s very difficult to get used to moving over a few millimeters to hit the correct key. Also, the “Ctrl” key is to the left of the “Fn” key, which is swapped from my last laptop, so that takes awhile to get used to as well.

My last comment would be a very positive one for the battery. My last laptop was a desktop replacement. Even with two installed batteries, the unit would last MAYBE 1 hour on battery while doing anything intensive. I paid quite a bit for the upgrade to the 8 cell, 65WHr battery, and am very pleased with it. The first day I used the laptop, it lasted over 5 hours on battery. Playing games it lasted about 3 hours, which is very impressive. Others have said it has lasted through two entire DVDs (4 hours), which would also be very impressive.

Pictures
I have taken some pictures of my Dell 700m. Click on each to see the larger picture, or view the whole album.

Crisp, glossy display.	Picture of entire unit.
Picture of keyboard.	Bottom of unit.
Closed unit, picture from back.	Closed unit, picture from front.
Closed unit, picture from top.

Overall I would rate this laptop a 9/10.

Edit 8/8:
I found some resources for the Dell Inspiron 700m.

Also, there is a newer driver than 4308 for the Intel chipset; just check the chipset page for the latest.

Edit 7/8/05:
I see that Dell has decreased the RAM prices from $925 for 2 1GB sticks to $675.