DELL JUST CAME out with ten new laptops today, some of which look very tasty indeed. They range from small to large, light to rugged, and have a ton of new features to go along with them.

The laptops start with the Lattitude E4200, a 12.1-inch sub-kilogram laptop and go up to the 13.3-inch E4300 that weighs an anchor-like 3.3 pounds. These are the ultra-portable variants. Moving on up, we have the mainstream E6400 and E6500, 14.1- and 15.4 inch models respectively. The bottom end Lattitude is the essential E5400 and E5500, same screen sizes, a lot cheaper body.

One outlier is the Lattitude E6400 ATG, a semi-rugged machine that meets the military 810F standard. The idea is not to have a howitzer-proof machine that runs as fast as a very sick water buffalo, but a full speed, no compromises machine that will take an above-average beating and some dust to go with it.

From there, the highest end parts are two new Precision laptops, m2400 and m4400 with 14.1 and 15.4-inch screens respectively. In the conference call, the Dell spokespeople mentioned a 17-inch model with 100 per cent colour gamut, quad cores and up to 2TB of storage, but we can't find any such beast on the Dell site as of this writing.

There are a bunch of neat touches across all of them, but nothing completely new. The biggest headline is that the E6400 with the extended battery and an extra 'slice' battery has enough juice for 19 hours of travel time. Translating vendor speak to real numbers, you should be able to get two full movies out of it on a flight, and that is an advance. To make matters even better, Dell is claiming a new feature called express charge that will fill the batteries to 80 per cent in only an hour. Looks like they have that overheating problem licked.

Other nice features include a backlit keyboard with an ambient light sensor, and most chassis are offered in no less than five colours. If the guy in accounting annoys you too much with stupid questions about email, he gets the Quartz Pink one 'by accident'.

Under the surface, we also have some nice additions, including a magnesium alloy structure for added rigidity. No more Sony Flexi-Chassis(TM)(R)(C) here, and the build quality should be distinctly un-Sony like too. In the higher-end machines, they also beefed up the hinges, they now look distinctly like the older IBM T4x era Thinkpads, basically big beefy chunks of metal. This is a good thing, a very good thing.

Another nice touch is that the new laptops have in common is the power adapters, they should work across all the new series. That allows Dell to make common docks, including some very slick new docking station/monitor combos. There is also a bunch of common accessories that play off the same common plugs, if they actually work as advertised, this could also be a very good thing.

Last but not least, we have two bits of software, the Dell Latitude On and Control Vault. Of the two, On is the best feature. It is a clone of the Asus Instant-On stuff, and likely works in the same way, but no details were given at the launch. On is a flash-based barebones Linux install that gets you up and running, on the Net, and with much of what you need to run the computer in instantly. Dell went to great pains to avoid saying the L-word though, it might anger the very touchy gods atop mount Redmond.

Control vault is basically a security centre software that actually does something. To be fair, it is hardware and software, and ties in a contactless RFID/smartcard sensor, improved (FIPS level) fingerprint reader, and NVRam to keep credentials in. The vault is the software that you see, and not all models have all the features.

In the end, there is actually a Dell notebook that your correspondent would consider buying now should they have Ubuntu variants and that's a rarity. The E6400/6500s are pretty damn nice, and the E4200 looks like a Sony TZ without the build quality nightmares and non-functional accessories. Who would have though Dell would come out with something that people actually want to buy?µ