Computer.co.uk

You’re young. You’re stylish. You’re hip. You walk past the Apple store and gaze longingly in through the window. You suffer from fits of uncontrollable laptop-envy. We’ve all been there. Minus the stylishness and hipness in a few cases, but we’ve all been there.

You want a laptop to carry with you, to nonchalantly flash around at meetings, and to make that slightly funny-smelling guy on the train ask in hushed, almost reverent, tones “Is that real leather on there?”

The concept of “netbooks” is fine; they’re small laptops for carrying around and getting on the net wherever you may be. But they lack processing power and storage capacity, and their graphics capabilities can’t compare to the big boys such as the XPS730x gaming desktop. The Dell Studio XPS 13 is something in between.

It has a 13″ widescreen display with 720p capabilities, it comes with a Core2 Duo processor, up to 4Gb of memory, 500Gb of storage and has an nVidia graphics card capable of handling some of the more intensive games.

Not to forget, in my opinion, its major selling points: it’s leather trim, LED-backlit keys, and the fact that it starts from the right side of £900.

This is a laptop which proudly shows its XPS heritage in its slick metallic and glossy finish, barrel-hinges and super-thin casing. And with a weight of around 2kg, it’s light enough to become permanently affixed to your hand.

What’s hot?

• Leather trim
• Backlit keyboard
• Beefy Intel processor

What’s not?

• It’s hard to find fault with this laptop.

It would be interesting to see your comments on how the battery life on this model holds up to daily use.