Over the past year or so, Dell has seen a dip in fortunes in the laptop market. Once considered the brand to emulate, both in terms of business support and product reliability, it's now been eclipsed by HP and a surprisingly resurgent Acer who's nipping at its heels. Rumors that Acer will soon surpass Dell as the world’s second largest notebook manufacturer has not helped the cause.

Despite such predictions of doom and gloom, Dell continues to offer some very good products. Its Latitude range is still among the best business laptops currently available. One of these is the Latitude D630 – the product we will be reviewing here.

Design and Features

Being a business class laptop, the D630 is very sober in its design and colour. It comes with a two-tone matte black-and-gray chassis that looks quite elegant. The construction material is sturdy – the lid and underside of the laptop are made from magnesium alloy. This imparts the body of the D630 a certain amount of stiffness, which eliminates any squeaks that might develop over time. The hinges, while not super reinforced as in Lenovo’s products, are quite sturdy, nicely designed, and long-lasting.
Another good thing we noticed is that the area surrounding the LCD panel is thicker than normal, that is, the screen is a bit more recessed than usual. This helps to prevent the screen from developing LCD pattern problems that could occur if excessive pressure is applied on the laptop.

Thanks to the lightweight materials used, the weight of the D630 is a good deal lower than laptops in its category, and is actually quite slim. All these factors combine to give it a very pleasing and welcome profile. It does not, for example, look as if you are lugging a large aluminum sheet to mug people with.
The keyboard of the D630 is surprisingly soft. It offers very good tactile feedback as it has the right amount of elevation. The keys themselves are made of a soft plastic and have a good matte finish, which allows for hours of typing without fatigue.

As in almost all business class laptops, both a trackpoint and touchpad are on offer. What's more, both of these are actually usable. The touchpad has good recession, tracking and no annoying side buttons to accidentally press. The trackpoint has a nice grooved plastic construction that offers just the right amount of friction.

The LCD panel of the D630 is what we like to call 'routinely generic'. Though it offers a nice widescreen resolution of 1440 x 900, the brightness and color levels are strictly muted. Even at maximum brightness the screen hardly stands out and while text is legible enough, multimedia activity won't be quite as pleasurable as on a normal consumer machine.

The D630 offers adequate peripheral and wireless connectivity. It comes with four USB 2.0 slots, a dual-layer DVD-RW, one IEEE 1394 (Firewire) slot, VGA in/out, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and 802.11n support.