The Dell Studio XPS 13 is a nice sleek and stylish 13.3” screen laptop. It’s a fusion of leather,  aluminium and plastic – these are the three materials that are present on the back of the lid. When you start this laptop the first thing that we liked is the way the touch buttons light up, then you will also see the backlit keyboard. Having backlight for the keys is a big plus point. Along with that the keys on the keyboard are well separated with pseudo key spacing. Not only do the keys have backlight, but the mouse buttons of the trackpad also do, and the buttons are a joy to press. Though the trackpad is smooth and accurate, it is slightly small. A few features of this laptop that we didn’t quite like are the thickness and weight. We find this laptop to be too thick for 13.3 inch screen and also it is slightly on the heavier side weighing in at 2.2 kgs. Looking at the sides of the laptop we found some interesting ports. There is a USB-eSATA combined port on the right, a DisplayPort and an HDMI port on the left, and instead of the regular single headphone and microphone ports, there are two 3.5 mm ports for headphones accompanied by a single microphone port. The optical drive  on this laptop is the slot loading kind. The screen of this laptop is really something to talk about; it has really great viewing angles as you can sit on the side and still view a clear picture. The inbuilt speakers are decent, nothing out of the ordinary, but just a slightly better than average. This motherboard has an Nvidia MCP79MX chipset and also a GeForce 9400M graphics solution which work together in Hybrid SLi. Stacked up with 2 GB DDR3 memory, it is a really good performer.

The battery that came along with this laptop was a 4-cell battery and it lasted for a total of 1 hour  and 25 minutes under performance mode of Hybrid SLI – this is what we expected from a 4-cell battery. If you are willing to look past the exteriors, the Dell Studio XPS 13 is a good buy. The model we received costs Rs. 59,900 and is definitely a good performer with the configuration that was present, but the price will vary according to the hardware you select.