Dell Latitude 500m Review

Designed primarily with business travelers in mind, this Latitude comes with replaceable hard drive, optical drive and battery. So you can easily insert a longer life battery or a DVD-ROM instead of CD-ROM. In place of a floppy drive there is a Modular bay designed to install various devices - Modular bay supports CD-ROM drive, CD-RW drive, DVD-ROM drive, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 2nd Lithium Ion battery, 2nd hard drive, floppy diskette drive and Dell Travelite travel module.

Multiple Ports
The Dell Latitude 500m also equipped with a large inventory of ports, new and old ones: Serial, Parallel, Video, Infrared, Audio, 2 USB 2.0, Modem, Ethernet LAN and 1PC card slot.

Docking Option
You can even get Latitude 500m with a Docking option... via built-in 280-pin connector for the D/Port-Family Advanced Port Replicator or for the D/View Notebook Stand from Dell.

The HotSpot Internet/LAN access
One of the main Intel's ideas behind Centrino was to enable wireless HotSpot connection for every laptop user... and so this what the Intel Pro/Wireless card is for - to connect to a corporate LAN via the 802.11b compliant wireless network at any HotSpot location. With this in mind, Dell offers one month free T-Mobile HotSpot connection with the purchase of 500m.

With ability to connect to internet at hotspots, a business user would gain the freedom to work wherever it's convenient, increasing his job satisfaction. Public hotspots can be found in airports, hotels, conference centers, and coffee shops, and their number grows... In a recent study, Intel found that employees who used wireless laptops with Intel Centrino mobile technology gained more than two hours per week of extra productivity.

I have to warn you though... the Pro/Wireless 802.11b chip connects to internet with the lowest transfer rate available today - 11 Mbps/sec. This is still an ok speed. but if you're not satisfied, you can always upgrade to Dell's TrueMobile 1300 chip that supports 802.11b and 802.11g for free, and still be able to access a hotspot. The only drawback is that you cannot legally call your laptop a 'Centrino laptop' but don't worry I won't tell.