The new hotness !

If you search for pictures of the M1330 you will always come up with a side profile but the coolness of the hinge design for the lid didn’t dawn on me until I saw it – no, until I felt it.

At the top of the keyboard are a set of controls to eject the CD/DVD, control the audio & playback etc. These are not buttons per se, but little touch sensitive spots that glow when you touch them. Very cool.

The XPS M1330 comes with Creative EP-630 Noise Isolation earphones that compare quite favourably to my standard work wear – Philips SHP805. They have 3 sizes of rubber seal for your ear, dunno how they feel when used for extended periods yet. This was a nice surprise.

...and there are other little supprises all throughout this machine. Someone, somewhere put thought into the design of this machine and it shows.
So, what’s not to like:

There are a couple of minor things – so minor I only list them for completeness. None of these are an obstacle to being very happy with this machine:
When you eject a CD the sound is like strangling a pigeon. Don’t ask me how I know what that sounds like, it just does.
Chipset does not support Intel VT. I use Virtual PC a lot, but VMs run fine without it.
The system comes with a 10Gb recovery partition. This isn’t a worry to me with 250Gb but if I had gone for the 64Gb Solid State drive for the extra thou’ I would be nuking this straight away
The battery in the media remote is tricky to seat properly.