We’ve reviewed just about every line of laptops that Dell makes over the years, but we haven’t had a chance to look at the Vostro line until today. Vostro is essentially Dell’s entry-level business laptop brand, with an emphasis on business-class support while maintaining a lower price point than the Latitude line. What that means is you give up some of the performance options of the consumer Inspiron and XPS lines, but you usually get better support and a matte LCD. Build quality is a bit of a question mark, and something we’ll discuss more in the review. The V131 we received for review is also quite thin, nearly at ultrabook levels, which raises an interesting question: how does an $800 (often less) business laptop compare with the upcoming ultrabooks and other thin and light laptops?

We’ve already had our first ultrabook review with the ASUS UX21E, and we expect more ultrabooks in for review in the next month, which makes this review of the Vostro V131 all the more pertinent. It supports full-power Core 2011 dual-core processors and uses integrated graphics, but it also has a standard battery that can easily be swapped out—and a larger battery capacity as well. If you’re interested in seeing how the Vostro V131 stacks up against the recently reviewed XPS 14z and ASUS UX21, or you’re wondering what you give up in moving from Dell’s Latitude line down to the Vostro, we should have all the information you need in this review.

Late last year, Dell announced the relaunch of their XPS brand. Since the announcement, we’ve reviewed several XPS laptops that have impressed in various ways. The XPS 15 is a larger mainstream notebook with the option for a beautiful 1080p display upgrade with a moderate discrete GPU and awesome speakers. If you’d like something slimmer and lighter, the XPS 15z cuts the fat and still hits most of the important features. We liked both laptops enough that they garnered Editor’s Choice awards, and we were quite interested in seeing what Dell would do with their smaller 14” offering.

The XPS 14z takes over for the now-defunct XPS 14, but with more of the 15z design language as opposed to the larger XPS models. One of the most impressive aspects of the 14z is that it packs a 14” LCD into the same size chassis typically used with 13.3” LCDs. The 14z is reasonably thin and light, and at least on paper it looks like it could go up against Apple’s MacBook Pro 13. Read on to find out where it does well, and where it comes up short.

Tablets have introduced a number of great features that are currently without equal in the notebook space. They are ultra light, extremely responsive, have tremendous battery life and are generally instant-on devices. Tablets however, aren't that great for being productive on, leaving good reason to still carry around a notebook. As both platforms continue to grow you'll see them learn from one another. Updates to the tablet experience in iOS 5 for example are clearly built around improving productivity. What about the notebook PC though? What is being done there to make it more tablet-like? This is where Intel's Ultrabook category of notebook PCs comes into play.

Ultrabooks today are simply ultra portable notebooks with a few requirements. They need to be thin, light, have a fast CPU (Sandy Bridge will do for now) and use some form of solid state storage. The SSD requirement helps OEMs guarantee that these Ultrabooks will have reasonable response time (application launch, OS boot, and wake). Despite the tablet comparison, Ultrabooks aren't intended to go up against ARM based tablets. Intel will eventually have an Atom powered answer in that space, although we likely won't see it until Windows 8 ships.

Hardware specs alone aren't enough to bridge the tablet gap, which is why Intel views new features through software as a major part of the Ultrabook play. Intel expects Ultrabooks won't really go mainstream until sometime in late 2012-2013, so this first wave of notebooks are really nothing more than ultraportable PCs. If you look close enough, they may even look like MacBook Air clones. With the Ivy Bridge and Haswell updates, Intel is expecting to expand the impact of what Ultrabooks mean but today they are pretty much well designed notebooks with a fancy name.

That's not to say that Ultrabooks can't be impressive. In fact, impressive is probably the best way to describe ASUS' first Ultrabook: the Zenbook. Available in 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch varieties, the Zenbook focuses on user experience and aesthetics more than any previous ASUS notebook. ASUS sent us the 11-inch UX21—read on for our take on one of the first Ultrabooks and ASUS' first Zenbook.

The original iPhone was designed to address a significant user experience problem with smartphones of the day. The iPhone itself was just the delivery vehicle, what later became known as Apple’s iOS was what made it all happen. At its launch in 2007 many lamented the significant loss of typical smartphone features with the very first iPhone. You couldn’t multitask, there was no copy/paste support, you couldn’t tether, you couldn’t send pictures or video via MMS and there were no apps. Apple of 2007 was very much a Mac company that was gaining strength, looking to dabble in the smartphone world.

iOS 5 has a number of headline features, including a ground-up redesign of the notifications system, a new iOS-to-iOS messaging service called iMessage, and the integration of iCloud, a cloud computing and storage service for iOS, OS X, and Windows. According to Apple, there are a full 200 new features found in iOS 5, with features like Twitter integration, wireless sync, PC Free setup and updating, display mirroring over AirPlay, multitasking gestures, and updates to core applications like the camera, browser, mail and calendar being among the more notable changes highlighted by Apple. It’s a pretty healthy list of things to cover, so we’ll get down to it.

In our first run with the Alienware M18x, we sat down and took a look at the notebook itself along with NVIDIA's current top shelf mobile graphics part, the GeForce GTX 580M. We came away from the experience with mixed impressions of the M18x itself, a notebook that is by all means incredibly powerful but also seems to lose a lot of the balance that made the M17x R3 so desirable. On the other hand, the GeForce GTX 580M wound up being the fastest mobile GPU we'd yet tested, made only more formidable through the SLI configuration the M18x enables.

Today, Alienware has graciously provided us with the second half of the current top shelf performance equation in the form of a near-identically configured M18x, this time with two AMD Radeon HD 6990Ms in CrossFire. We'll also take a look at the Intel Core i7-2920XM's stock performance and compare it against the overclocked settings Alienware allows you to configure it with.