Dell has revamped its Latitude XT tablet PC to include a six-cell battery that offers up to 11 hours of battery life, as well as other features such as support for newer DDR3 (double data rate 3) main memory.
The Dell Latitude XT2 tablet officially went on sale Feb. 10 for a starting price of $2,399, according to the company. Dell originally jumped into this specific part of the laptop market in 2007 with the original Latitude XT tablet notebook.
Dell is not the only company to recently revamp its tablet lineup. Earlier this month, Fujitsu upgraded several of its LifeBook tablet laptops to support AT&T’s 3G wireless broadband technology.
In addition to some of the new features, the Dell Latitude XT2 tablet offers a choice of either an ultra low-volt Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300 processor running at 1.2GHz or the Core 2 Duo SU9400 chip running at 1.4GHz. The two Intel processors are built on newer 45-nanometer manufacturing.
The Latitude XT2 also supports integrated Intel graphics.
For business users, Dell is also supporting Intel’s vPro technology – a chip bundle that makes managing and securing a corporate laptop fleet easier and more centralized – with the Latitude XT2 tablet. In addition, the Dell tablet also supports DASH (desktop and mobile architecture for system hardware) 1.0 security standards.
The revamped battery life for the Latitude XT2 is reminiscent of what Dell first offered when the company introduced its Latitude “E” business laptops in August. In that case, Dell began offering some Latitude notebook with 19 hours of battery life.
Dell has also included support for newer DDR3 memory with the Latitude XT2 tablet instead of offering more conventional DDR2 memory. According to Dell’s Web site, the XT2 tablet offers between 1GB and 5GB of DDR3 main memory. Dell is also offering a SATA (serial ATA) hard disk drive with up 120GB of data storage or a solid state drive (SSD) that offers up to 128GB of storage.
The Latitude XT2 tablet has a 12.1-inch, WXGA LED display that support multitouch technologies and users can use either a finger or stylus to write on the tablet. Dell also supports 64-bit Microsoft Windows Vista with the XT2 tablet and the company also offers a downgrade option to the Windows XP Tablet operating system.