It’s been four days now since I got my Dell XPS M1530 pre-installed with Ubuntu. You can see the unboxing pictures here. While I am not ready for a full review, I am ready to give some first impressions. Here is what I have noticed so far:

• Not everything worked out of the box (such as some issues with the webcam/mic, dictionary problems in Firefox, and suspend and hibernation)
• It still has a Windows logo on the super key.
• A GUI utility should be provided for setting up the fingerprint reader. Also, if that is not possible, the instructions for setting it up from the CLI should be made much more obvious. It exists, but it is not obvious.
• The initial setup process asked some unneeded questions and left some out. For example, it asked what type of keyboard I had, which Dell already knows. Instead, it would be more logical to let you set up your fingerprint reader.
• The overall design of the laptop is quite nice. Additionally, the incredibly high resolution screen looks great!
• The fingerprint reader works well and was easy to set up, once I found a tutorial.
• The material of the wrist rest appears to be brushed plastic. It looks like brushed metal, but it sounds like plastic if you tap it and bends some under pressure, at least on one side.
• The glossy black finish around the power button and the media controls do collect some fingerprints, but it is not too visible. More concerning are the fingerprints that collect on the back of the laptop. This is not a huge deal, though.

A full review should be coming later, so keep looking back!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.