Dell Toughens Up Notebook LineDell Toughens Up Notebook Line

Dell has introduced its first fully rugged mobile laptop that meets all of the Department of Defense's requirements for products that operate in extreme environmental conditions.The Latitude XFR D630, which costs $3,899 for the base configuration and is compatible with other Latitude models, is shock-resistant and resists moisture, high altitude, and high temperatures, according to Dell's director of product marketing. The laptop is available with a variety of dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processors as fast as 2.4 GHz with 4 MB of cache, includes an 80-GB hard drive and can be equipped with as much as 4 GB of RAM. The XFR D630 also weighs less than 9 pounds, sports a 14.1-inch wide-aspect LCD and runsWindows XP Professional or Windows Vista.

Although Dell is targeting its laptop at bigger organizations, the military and local government, part of its appeal to SMBs able to push their budgets is simplified IT maintenance; the XFR D630 laptop can use the same BIOS or firmware upgrades as conventional PCs, according to Brett McAnally, director of product marketing at Dell. It also will let organizations extend computing to new environments, he said.InfoWorld, GottaBeMobile