Carla Thornton

Dell Inspiron 8500

While other vendors (Apple, Dell, Sony, and Toshiba) offer desktop replacements with traditional screens that grow ever taller (measuring 15.7, 16, and even 17 inches diagonally), Dell is going wider. The new wide-aspect Inspiron 8500 measures 15.4 inches diagonally with a resolution of up to 1920 by 1200 pixels, and has a 16:10 aspect ratio. It's about 2 inches wider than the 15.7-inch-diagonal standard-aspect screen offered by Gateway's 600X. What can you do with the extra width? Watch DVD movies without those annoying black bands, for one thing. The wider aspect also lets you display side-by-side desktop publishing or e-book pages, or side-by-side browser windows--handy for Web design. And in our graphics tests, the 8500 combined the wider screen with fast frame rates for great-looking gaming. It even produced higher frame rates than Alienware's highly touted gaming notebook, the Area-51m, in Unreal Tournament at 1024 by 768 resolution and 32-bit color. The wide screen is just one element of a complete redesign of Dell's flagship notebook, resulting in a lighter, sleeker portable than the dark, 8-pound Inspiron 8200. The elegant 8500 has a silver skin with dark blue mouse buttons and keyboard border. Dedicated audio buttons sit in a vertical panel down the right side of the keyboard. The 8500's dual pointing devices, a touchpad and an eraserhead, improve on the 8200's dual design, especially with regard to the eraserhead's mouse buttons. They depress more deeply and comfortably than the 8200's stiff, concave buttons did. The 8500 also introduces an external battery gauge (you had to remove the battery to see the old one) and a spring-loaded release on the side for the optical drive (on the 8200, you had to slide a release on the bottom of the notebook). For a notebook with such an enormous screen, the 8500 is remarkably slender and easy to carry. It measures 1.6 inches tall with the lid closed and weighs 7.3 pounds, not including the power adapter.
Battery life is mediocre at 2.3 hours, and the keyboard felt flimsy to us. When we typed, we could see the keyboard flex.
The 8500 may have a breathtaking screen, but it's modestly equipped otherwise. All of the expected notebook connections are there, including a FireWire port, but you get no fancy memory slots or multiple USB ports. Our unit did include the optional Dell TrueMobile 802.11b/g wireless Mini-PCI card for wireless networking.Its side release for devices, which resembles the one on IBM's ThinkPad notebooks, makes the 8500's modular bay a delight to use. Popping out the combination drive in our review unit was simple, and warm-swapping in one of the 8500's extra-cost options--a second battery, a 40GB hard drive, or a floppy drive--should be easy. The speakers emit good, strong sound from the front; and the CD controls, including two volume buttons and mute, are convenient and elegantly designed. If you need to upgrade memory or remove the hard drive for safekeeping, both are easy to access. RAM sits under a protective panel on the bottom, held in place by a single screw. The hard drive slides out of the left side by its end piece, which also covers the mike and headphone ports. The 8500 earned a PC WorldBench 4 score of 105, very close in performance to the 107 posted by the other two 2.4-GHz Pentium 4-M notebooks we've tested. Though we received only an early, partial version of the documentation, it looked helpful and well illustrated, with drawings that thoroughly explained the notebook's features. According to Dell, the 8500 will ship with an electronic version on the hard drive.Dell continues to offer plastic color inserts for dressing up its notebooks. For the 8500, you can buy $39 snap-on lid covers in four different colors to replace the blue panels that ship on the unit.
The Inspiron 8500's wide screen and smooth game-playing performance make it an ideal desktop replacement, but its keyboard takes some getting used to.