Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops

joetheprogrammer writes "Dell has announced that they are going to offer a special configuration option with its Latitude D420 laptop that will allow users to swap clunky old HDs in favor of a 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive. The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer. 'The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk SSD, which SanDisk announced in January, increases performance by as much as 23 percent and is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude line, Dell said. The drive, currently available in North and South America, costs $549 -- on par with the 32GB drive Sony is offering exclusively in Japan for the Type-G Vaio. SanDisk will expand SSD availability to Europe and Asia in the near future.'"

Comments

Re:I for one...

[evilviper]

Several pointed out that their fingers were too large to fit on keys that small and that close together.

To which I pointed out that the keys are 3/4ths normal size. Scaling it up to 9" wide would accommodate anyone who can type on a standard keyboard.

I can keep my fingers on the home keys with just enough room to clear properly as I type on my laptop keyboard. [...] I can't imagine that I'd be happy with a keyboard that was crammed into a form factor that was four inches shorter.

Existing laptop keyboards are horribly designed, as I already explained. Bigger, smaller, they'll still be horribly difficult to use, for no good reason.

The "four inches shorter" bit is nonsense. With a different arrangement, you can easily have larger keys, in far less space. Existing laptop keyboards suck. Period.

So, I should be resting my wrists on either my legs or a thin sheet of pull out plastic instead of on the relatively sturdy surface of the laptop cover?

If you'd ever tried it with a flat keyboard, you'd see that it's really quite comfortable to have no wrist rest, even when your keyboard is resting on your lap.

Also "thin" doesn't mean weak or flimsy, by any stretch of the imagination.

A higher DPI display would be nice, no doubt. However, I'm having trouble reading 8 or 9 point fonts on paper these days. :(

Backlighting, sub-pixel rendering, high contrast, and other tricks could make a screen easier to read than paper.

The point is that all laptops represent a set of design compromises.

No, they don't. They represent an utter and total lack of any design at all. No effort was made to make them usable in the slightest. Key placement is practically random. Screen size, type, and placement is just "whatever" costs less, looks good in the specs of the unit, and where ever there is spare room. Disc placement is where ever it fits. Port placement is absolutely random, and based on the layout of the motherboard.

Absolutely no thought is ever put into ergonomics of laptops. Nobody does, so nobody feels they'll lose any customers if they also don't bother. PDAs have ergonomic design, because the tighter constraints absolutely require it, and in turn, you get tiny PDAs that are easier to use than far larger notebooks. Size isn't remotely as important as design.

The current form factor is one that I find very useful.

Of course it works, for loose definitions of the word. You've simply never tried anything smaller, and better designed, so you don't know that it could be much, much better, in even less space.