Ask any five business professionals what their requirements are for a good laptop and you could get five different answers. While some business professionals would choose storage and memory and connectivity as the most important features of a good business notebook, others would say that battery life, weight and even durability are equally important. 

A Dell survey of nearly 4,000 IT professionals and end users showed that productivity is the number one concern of IT people using notebooks followed by design. Third on the list is "peace of mind", which means total protection for the users and IT managers. Lastly is total control of ownership, which means control of the notebook even from a remote location. 

In a press conference Thursday at the Makati Shangri-La, Dell Philippine country manager Barry Bunyi said it is launching a new line of Dell Latitude laptops in the Philippines, which provides breakthroughs on extended battery life, portability and design.

"We've invested more than one million engineering hours and the result is a family of head-turning products that are as solid on the inside as on the outside, with features that enable better security, manageability and productivity," he told reporters.

New laptops

The new Dell Latitude E4200 is a 12.1-inch laptop that starts at 1 kg making it the lightest commercial notebook in the company's history.  The 13.3-inch Latitude E4300, meanwhile, has a starting weight of 1.54 kg.1 

The Dell Latitude E6400 and E6500 are 14.1- and 15.4-inch laptops that retail for P120,000. The 14.1-inch Dell Latitude E5400 notebook and the 15.4-inch E5500 retail for P80,000.

Incorporating a wide range of new technology, Dell's new Latitudes feature:

•           All-day computing on the E6400 with breakthrough battery life of up to 19 hours;  
•           Full-frame magnesium alloy construction and all-metal hinges;
•           Sophisticated keyboard design;
•           Ease of use with Dell ControlPoint, centralizing control of user settings for power management, connectivity configurations and security management in a single application;
•           First business-class laptop with an intelligent backlit keyboard that automatically adjusts to ambient light levels;
•           Exclusive ControlVault solution –  intelligent security sub-processors with embedded non-volatile storage that centralizes and helps protect user credentials and security keys in a single hardened security "vault" away from the systems main drive; 
•           The E6500 is the only laptop with both a contact-less Smart Card reader and a fingerprint readers that complies with Federal Information Processing Standards; and,
•           Simplified IT with compatible peripherals, adapters, docking and robust manageability features across the entire portfolio.

Immediate e-mail access

The company also previewed Dell Latitude ON, a new technology that will enable near-instant access to e-mail, calendar, attachments, contacts and the Web without booting into the system's main operating system.

All of the new products are also available with Dell's ProSupport Mobility Services, a suite of modular services that help companies protect assets and data. To protect confidential company information, Dell can also automate data encryption on all laptops and centrally manage company-defined security policies in a way that is transparent to the end-user.

Bunyi said sales of Dell desktops and servers in the Philippines grew by 26 percent in the second quarter of the year compared to the same period last year. He added that Dell laptop sales have grown by 390 percent for the second quarter and are expected to grow even further with the launch of the Dell Latitude series.