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Written by Sasa Pantelic
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Friday, 17 April 2009 |
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Page 1 of 3  Vostro is brand of Dell notebooks that belongs to accessible business class. Vostro A860 is model that was designed with one goal: achieving as low as possible price tag that will be attached to it. Since manufacturer is trying to go with lowest price as possible, compromise between desires and possibilities has to be made. It will be very interesting to see how one of the largest notebook manufacturers is going to make his choices when it comes to components and build quality under these conditions.
Dell Vostro A860 is following contemporary trends when it comes to its design. Striking cover is a must and in this department Dell Vostro A860 didn’t disappoint. Its black cover with piano finish and Dell logo will not be unnoticed in most occasions. We find that notebook from business class should have matte surfaces but it seems that even business users are getting stylish. On the other hand if Dell didn’t make a cover in piano finish, this model would look somewhat “washed out” and it wouldn’t look this good because it doesn’t have any additional details or multimedia buttons. As expected there are no avant-garde design details or elements when this model is opened where most surfaces are in black except silver stripe that goes along sides and front. Area above keyboard (close to display) and bottom segment of display are slightly sloped which looks nice.
Next detail that caught our eye was small number of connectors. HDMI and DVI were not expected on budget model but at least another USB port would be nice, especially if we take into account the fact that two USB ports that are present and located one above the other. Interesting fact is that despite obvious frugality Dell managed to squeeze in one FireWire port but didn’t include webcam while existence of Bluetooth module is actually for most business users very important. Touch pad is small and precise, keyboard does bend slightly in the middle (nothing to worry about) with keys that have unusually soft and well measured key stroke – real pleasure to use it.
Although Dell Vostro A860 design looks very much like many consumer models, it kept many business features that we would like to highlight. One of the most important details is display with anti-glare surface. These days it is really hard to find budget model with this kind of display, and for many this is very important feature when searching for business notebook. Display has unusual size – 15.6 inch. It would be very interesting to hear someone from Dell why business notebook has 16:9 display and 1366x758 resolution that is very good for movie watching. Picture on this display is very good and actually better from expected.
If you have read some of our previous notebook reviews, you could notice that we prefer Core Duo CPUs over Celeron CPUs mostly because of two cores. Well Intel has decided to make our lives more complicated and reason can be found in Dell Vostro A860 in form of Celeron Dual Core, which means that it does have two cores. Core Duo is still more advanced model because it can lower frequency in real-time and lower its power consumption but now Celeron is getting back in the game also. Since in this price category single core Celeron CPUs dominate, Vostro A860 has very significant advantage when it comes to raw processing power. When it comes to other components that are present in Vostro A860 things doesn’t look that good. Only one gigabyte of RAM isn’t something that you should be satisfied with in era of cheap memory modules, so be generous when it comes to memory upgrade. Chipset that this notebook is based on belongs to previous generation and with it comes also integrated graphics card with slightly lower performance levels compared to contemporary models. Of course, average business user that uses its notebook for communication, surfing and office applications doesn’t need more than this. It is obvious that Dell concluded that most business users don’t know what is inside an notebook and that “what they don’t know about, can’t hurt them” philosophy can be justified in this case because it resulted in significantly lower price. We didn’t like the fact that included battery is small and because of this autonomy results are humble. Also sound isn’t a strong point of this model.
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Dell Vostro A860 that we got didn’t come with preinstalled Widows but with Ubuntu 8.04. Maybe for some of you this will be problem but actually when it comes to business users they don’t need much more than that. Only problem can be Internet Explorer and support for ActiveX but there is a way around this problem also HERE . Also if you really can’t live without Windows applications there is Wine Project that supports most business applications.
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