Dell last week announced the release of a new range of its Latitude business range of laptop computers which we looked at in a previous post. One of the ways that Dell is seeking to differentiate its laptops from those of other vendors is through something called Dell Latitude ON. This feature allows access to e-mail, calendar, attachments, contacts and the Internet very quickly without actually booting into Windows Vista.

The idea

The idea is that a lot of the time, e-mail, the Internet and chat are all we want to do with our laptop, so if you have the ability to do that without having to wait minutes (although it is always seems like hours) for our laptop to boot up that would be a very compelling feature, especially if your on the move a lot. Also by using this feature you are using very little power potentially having a very positive effect on battery life.

How it works

I promised in the previous post that I would investigate how this is achieved. It would appear that the Latitudes that support this feature (not all do) will utilise a completely separate dedicated, Linux subsystem using  a low-power ARM processor and flash memory. This will run completely  independently from the laptop’s main CPU and storage. The custom Linux OS Enterprise will includes a Firefox-based browser and email, calendar, and contacts applications as well as MS Office and PDF viewers to view attachments.  As far as I understand on board data is not accessed locally so data has to be pulled from a central source via a wireless connection.

Dell appears to have got a head start on the other mainstream vendors although Asus have been playing with something similar for a while. These “instant on” operating systems seem like they could be really useful and is something that we may see grow in importance over the next few years. What do you think?

In the meantime the existing Dell Latitude range are presently available with some nice discounts, of which the Dell Latitude D630C is a nice example (follow the shop link to see the discounts).