'DNA' Digital: Dell XPS 13 versus Asus Lamborghini VX6S

Exquisitely crafted Ultrabook — Dell XPS 13
Ultrabooks are here to stay for a while, there’s no two ways about that and Intel will do what it does best in marketing them. Right now, we’re still seeing the premium wave of Ultrabooks and the latest entrant to hit India is Dell’s XPS 13 head-turner. It’s one of the sexiest and most advanced Ultrabooks out there in terms of design and build. The chassis is built from machined-aluminium and Dell uses a carbon fibre base to keep it light, cool and durable. It’s insanely slim at just 6mm at its thinnest point making it the perfect gadget to carry around in your briefcase. Dell have managed to squeeze in a 13.3-inch into a bezel of a typical 11-inch netbook, thanks to the edge-to-edge display protected by Gorilla Glass, so it’s scratch-resistant as well. There’s also an ambient light sensor near the webcam that automatically adjusts the display brightness.

The XPS 13 has your basic connectivity options covered like two USB ports, DisplayPort for TV-out and a headphone/microphone combo jack. We are missing a card-reader and a LAN jack, so if you depend on these, then it may be a deal-breaker for you. Also, since the battery is fixed, you get an indicator on the side to tell you how much charge is left. The XPS 13 very easy to maintain.

The entire keyboard area and trackpad has a rubberised finish, including the trackpad. The keys are very comfortable to type at long stretches and are backlit, with two intensity settings. The glass trackpad tracks well and multi-finger gestures are present as well but we just wished it was placed a bit towards the left as it tends to get in the way while typing and sadly, there’s no shortcut to disable it either.

Under the hood, it’s business as usual. You have a choice of either a Core i5 or i7 from Intel’s ULV range and the capacity of SSD. The rest of the specifications remain the same across all three configurations Dell has to offer in India. Dell does include a dual-band Wi-Fi chip which takes advantage of the faster 5GHz band, provided your router supports it. Performance is good for regular multimedia and productivity tasks. You could even run Photoshop off it as the SSD helps in moving data around quickly, which also has an effect on boot-up times. Battery life is also not too bad and you should be able to get around 4-5 hours, depending on your usage. Prices start at Rs79,900 and go all the way up to Rs1 lakh for the high-end version. Clearly, this is not meant for the average Joe and scores low in the value-for-money segment. But, if you’re looking for a premium notebook with excellent design and build with performance to boot, there XPS 13 is in a league of its own.

Packs a lot of grunt — Asus Lamborghini VX6S
Marrying supercar themes with computing has been a long-standing trend in the PC industry and the latest addition is the new Asus Lamborghini Edition VX6S netbook. Since netbooks aren’t very interesting to begin with, Asus have decided to spice things up a bit to make it seem more appealing. Right from the design to the material used, to the boot-up sound — you can easily tell a lot of thought and attention to detail went into this netbook. Available in white and orange, the VX6S is a real beauty and the sculpted lid and glossy paint job give you a faithful taste of the car it’s based on. There’s plenty of other little details and accents reminiscent of the Murciélago LP640 which gives it a unique and ubercool look.

The netbook offers good connectivity too with two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, LAN, VGA and a card reader. The 6-cell battery pack that accompanies the netbook helps give the keyboard a comfortable typing position. The VX6S features a chiclet keyboard which makes it comfortable to type on even for extended sessions. The trackpad has a high gloss coating which looks striking but isn’t very practical to use in real life. The tracking is a bit lazy and the mouse pointer doesn’t respond well all the time.

Being a Lamborghini Edition netbook, Asus had to give a bit more oomph to set it apart from the crowd. Under the hood, we have Intel’s latest Cedar Trail D2700 Atom CPU which runs at a speed of 2.1GHz. It’s certainly a step up from the earlier ‘N-series’ CPUs and is also faster than AMD’s current Fusion APUs. For the first time, we have a netbook fitted with a dedicated graphics card so at last you can actually do some serious gaming. The card in question is an AMD HD 6470M, which, albeit an entry-level card, is enough to run most 3D games smoothly at this resolution. Other specifications include a 500GB hard-drive and 4GB of RAM, so it’s quite feature-packed. The 12-inch LED backlit screen produces rich colours and is bright enough for outdoor use. Performance is solid, both for multimedia tasks as well as gaming. Sadly, battery life does take a bit of a hit due to the discrete graphics card being constantly on; so don’t expect a ten-hour back-up time.

At Rs38,000, it is quite an expensive proposition for a netbook. If you want to make a style statement or if you are someone who loves attention, then nothing will do that more than a bright orange netbook. Asus have done a fantastic job with the build and finish of the VX6S. And if you want a jazzier option for basic computing, then this Asus fits the bill just right.