Otaku Gadgets

The Dell Studio S1440-022B is targeted at school students who are looking for a budget laptop. This new offering from Dell does something quite bold and does away with the optical drive altogether. As a result, the laptop becomes much slimmer and weighs less as well.

14-inch laptops are not known for being very lightweight and while the Dell Studio S1440 does not break any records, it is plenty portable at only 4.7 pounds. To further put things into perspective – 14-inch laptops hardly come under 5 pounds. The S1440 has a very slim and compact design and manages to run for quite sometime. It also has something of an extra in its ports where it features a DisplayPort. It also bundles not trial but full version licensed softwares within the price.

But what is it really like working without an optical drive? Is this laptop a worthy buy? Read on to find out.

At $750, the Dell Studio S1440 is priced just right for its category. It offers everything a student could be asking for and more. However, you have to look past the core configuration and look at the entire bundle.

The S1440 offers buyers full versions of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. There’s also a 15 months license of Norton’s Internet Security 2009, which makes for robust security albeit hogging some resource.

Weighing in at less than 5 pounds and with a long battery life, this laptop scores high on portability. Portability is a primary concern for students and this is where Dell has made really smart choices. Useful softwares out of the box and a cheap price are the other concerns of the majority of students. Dell has answered these as well with the pricing and the bundled software.

As for the missing optical drive – how many people still use the DVD-RW drives on their laptops? Most of the data on laptops comes from the Internet, WiFi, Ethernet or from pen-drives.

When it comes to the design, Dell breaks a few norms of the industry. While most of the laptops these days are coming out with glossy finishes, the S1440 actually goes ahead with a satin finish on the exterior. This relieves the user off worrying about fingerprints and smudges. The interior has a plastic finish that looks really nice. There is a bit of gloss above the keyboard where the screen joins the body and on the thin bezel that surrounds the screen.

The keyboard on the Dell Studio S1440 is a large and comfortable one. It has very little space left on each side and hence it fully utilizes the laptop’s width. The reviewers have reported that the keys feel as good as they look and perhaps even better. They are apparently very quite and have just the right amount of travel. Quite keys are a blessing inside a classroom because you do not want to be clickety-clacking away in the middle of a silent class, especially if you are doing something you are not supposed to do.

The touchpad buttons have been reported as a bit too cushy but easy to use nonetheless. Even though the S1440 has a 16:9 aspect ratio, there are no dedicated multimedia keys. The function keys take care of that. Just like Macs, the functions keys perform the actions assigned to them when pressed. When pressed in combination with the ‘fn’ key, they work like the normal functions keys (F1, F2, etc). For Windows laptops though, this is actually a reversal of what it is usual but there are other laptops in the market that use this convention. The wrist area is a bit narrow than usual but still provides for a good amount of support. Dell offers backlit keyboards on similar models through its website but you won’t get that option if you buy retail units.

The screen is 14.1 inches diagonal and has a 16:9 aspect ratio that is perfect for movies. The native 1366×768 aspect ratio makes it perfect for watching movies in HD (720p though). However, the widescreen will make viewing long documents slightly awkward.

Another thing noted by the reviewers is the fact that the speakers sound really good for their size. Even on full volume they have been reported as being surprisingly clear and enough for watching a movie without headphones.

Dell tries to cover the missing optical drive by offering buyers a plethora of ports. While having an HDMI output is quite common these days, the same cannot be said for the DisplayPort output that the Dell Studio S1440 has.

The S1440 has a quirk whereby it has two headphone ports instead of one. This is probably done keeping in mind the fact that sometimes we want to share the music or the movie playing on our laptop. There is the usual microphone input.

The laptop also has a four-pin standard firewire port, which is another port that is becoming less and less common these days. Still, the S1440 has it and it is a good thing for those with older firewire devices like external audio interfaces and storage devices.

There are three USB 2.0 ports, with the third one being a combo port containing eSATA as well as USB. There’s also a webcam included. There is an ExpressCard/34 port as well, which will make some people happy because some of the mobile broadband services still use these cards. It has Ethernet and WiFi (802.11b/g/n) but no Bluetooth, which is bad. However, if you can sacrifice one USB port from time to time, you can use a cheap Bluetooth dongle that you can find almost anywhere these days.

The S1440 runs on a mid range Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.1 GHz (a T6500 processor). It comes with 3GB of DDR3 SDRAM memory (1066Mhz) and 320GB of storage (5400rpm SATA). Graphics is handled by the small but powerful 256MB Nvidia GeForce 9400M with which you can play moderate 3D games at decent settings.

Battery runs well over 5 hours on average usage and on low-power settings it can easily go over 5.5 hours to almost 6.

Competing laptops on the market definitely provide more performance for this price. However, they do not offer the full version softwares or the design. So if you are looking for something that is portable and usable out of the box for $750, this is great laptop to go for.