Dell Unveils Its First Blu-Ray Notebook

Dell announced yesterday its first systems that integrate a Blu-ray drive. XPS 1710 is Dell's first laptop ever to have integrated Blu-Ray capabilities but also the industry's second laptop that integrated this kind of optical drive following Sony's own Vaio mobile PC.

"We continue to see PCs - both desktops and notebooks - functioning as the entertainment and productivity hub in the home and on the road with their versatility, power, connectivity, and vibrant high-definition displays. We believe high-definition video powered by Blu-ray Disc technology will be a significant part of that entertainment experience," stated Alex Gruzen, senior vice president, Dell Product Group.

The Dell XPS M1710 first unveiled in April this year comes with 17" UXGA (1600x1200) screen, Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz) CPU, a GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, up to 4GB of dual-channel DDR2 PC2-5300, 160GB of storage space, CD/DVD/Blu-ray burner and wireless 802.11g networking. The list continues for a while, but with rather unimportant details that regard the multimedia capabilities. The notebook comes with Windows MCE and the bundle also includes a remote controller for it. Pricing with BD burner included starts at about $3699. That's a lot, even for an XPS laptop, but if you want Blu-Ray, you'll buy it.

Competing HD DVD technology is also available in laptops from Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba, but the machines can only read HD-DVDs. I can't however imagine who would want to burn a 30GB disk if the total storage space comes at a maximum of 160GB. And if you still want to buy a HD capable laptop, keep in mind that such a device has a weight comparable only to its storage capacity.