Dell’s XPS 15z – How does the “thinnest 15-inch PC on the planet” stack up?

A couple of weeks ago you might have noticed Dell advertising a laptop called the XPS 15z here on The Next Web. I noticed, and my curiosity was piqued by Dell’s claim of it being the thinnest 15-inch laptop on the market. So, I dropped a line to the folks at Dell to see if we could get our hands onto one to give it a thorough review.

We’ll do a full review in a couple of weeks, but I first wanted to take the chance to give a quick overview of the machine, its high and low points, and to let you get an up-close look. Even though the device has been on the market since May of this year, it’s still one of Dell’s premiere laptops and well worth the time spent to review.

The first thing that you’ll likely notice is that it’s light, weighing in at about 5.5 lbs in the stock capacity. That stock configuration, by the way, is an Intel Core i5 at 2.3 GHz, 6 GB of DDR 1333 and a 500 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive with Nvidia GeForce GT 525M graphics. An 8-cell battery gives about 4 hours of work time when browsing the Internet, though you can easily squeak closer to 5 hours out of it with a few brightness and performance tweaks.

In the stock configuration, the 15z will hit your wallet for $900, but the i7, SSD and boosted RAM options of course can take things a bit more expensive. All said, you can fully load the hardware of the 15z for right at $1,500. At that price point, it’s a firm competitor for a Windows-version of a MacBook Pro, if you’re looking for such a device.

The laptop, overall, feels very sturdy. Dell has moved away from the plastics of earlier days, opting instead for magnesium alloy and aluminum across the device. I will say, however (and I even say so in the video) that some of the surfaces still feel very much like plastic.

The chicklet keyboard is comfortable, if a bit less tactile than I’d like. The backlighting is a much-welcomed feature, but I wonder about the keys eventually having their covering worn thin, a situation that a backlight would only serve to make worse.

Like most consumer-facing laptops from Dell, Toshiba and the rest, there’s a fair amount of crapware included that you’ll see on your first boot. Not only are there widgets, which you can see in the image below, but there are also offerings from Dell itself for backup, McAfee for antivirus and the other usual suspects.

I’m heading to Detroit this week, talking about automotive technology with Ford, General Motors and others. I’ll be taking the 15z with me to see how it stacks up for day-to-day use. When I get back, you can expect a full review. For now, here are some photos to tide you over.

CES 2011: The future of food is wireless in the store and in your home

Imagine being out in your car and suddenly having the urge to bake cookies. Do you have eggs at home? Do you have milk to drink with your cookies? An app on your phone tells you that you have 12 eggs, more than enough to make Tollhouse cookies but you are out of milk. It then gives you directions to the nearest supermarket that has your favorite brand of organic soy milk.

Once you get to the supermarket, imagine walking down the shopping aisle and being able to view in-depth product information at anything you look at- like nutritional information and expiration dates. The store manager also knows exactly how many boxes of which kind of cereal he has in his store. And when there are only 5 boxes of Cheerios left, the shelf senses this and wirelessly puts in an order for more.

Once you get home from the supermarket, you have to mix the ingredients together by yourself, but then the cookies are wirelessly baked for you. No oven, no stovetop required. Think electromagnetic induction powered cookie pans.

Everything I’ve just detailed is all possible. And it was demoed today by Fulton Innovation, the same company that also wirelessly powered a Tesla car . The wireless technology would be embedded on the supermarket shelf and in consumer’s homes to help manage and track inventory. The products are embedded with inductive ink and it’s the kind of ink that can be used on existing printing technology. This ink is part of eCoupled’s integrated wireless technology from Fulton Innovation, which also features a home monitoring system like in the photo below.

In the kitchen all food can be heated and controlled without wires. In fact, I saw soup heating up in its own container. Just by pulling a tab and placing the container on an eCoupled-enabled countertop, the contents will heat to a low, medium or high temperature, depending on the user’s preference.  They also offer a set of kitchen utensils like a magnetic saucepan that can be placed on any surface and cook food wirelessly. You can literally hold it in the palm of your hand while it’s cooking sauce and you won’t be burned. And while they don’t have specific prices yet, a Fulton rep said the technology isn’t even that expensive. The tech is more secure than RFID and they even say it’s safe for our brains because “it’s under a certain limitation in the magnetic field,” set by the U.S. and other national governments.

What do you think of a future of wireless food?

The Adapt Pico Play, projecting family favourites whatever the location

As mobile handsets begin to over an array of different ways to display your content on your personal computer or television via HMDI or even a 3.5mm headphone jack, you would think it odd to consider projecting the media stored on your phone.

Truth be known, there are a number of different devices available that connect to your smartphone, allowing you to project the photos and videos you have taken of your friend and family. Just last week, we took delivery a new personal projector, the Adapt Pico Play, the smallest personal projector on the market that is actually lighter and shorter than an iPhone.

Opening the box, the Pico Play is seriously small. Bundled with an array of cables, including an iPhone connector, the mini-projector supports external media via a SD card reader, a USB connection or via its own 1GB internal storage.

When the Pico Play is switched on, the device, by default, displays any media stored on the device. For our tests, we connected an iPhone 4 expecting the projector to instantly display the home screen of the Apple smartphone. A quick click of the menu button on the Pico Play allows the user to select an AV-input, opening up the option to display photos and videos on your iPhone.

Due to the restrictions placed on devices by Apple, the only way media can be projected is to start a slideshow on the device itself. Once selected, the Pico Play will instantly kick into life, transitioning between photos and videos and outputting them on a surface with screen sizes up to 54 inches with an impressive 8 lumens of brightness.

The Pico Play outputs sound but it will be a case of finding the right distance to set the projector to get the best results. In our tests, the projector struggled to output videos past a distance of around 6 feet, but the quality was very watchable at distances inclusive of that mark.

Adding media via an SD card, the Pico Play displays an aesthetic file manager that allows you to quickly and easily move between folders and display MPEG videos and photos. We ran the device for around an hour and the battery indicator indicated one bar, matching the one and a half hour playback touted on the Personal Projector website.

If you are looking for one of these devices, you obviously know that you will need a dark room to get the most of the Adapt Pico Play projector. Coming in at a very reasonable £99 at Personal Projector , the device launches on November 29 but is available to pre-order now. Showing it to friends and family, they saw many more uses for the Pico Play than the typical movie playback. Most saw the advantage of being able to display media wherever they were instead of having to hunt down a television set or a laptop to show off photos taken at events or shots of loved ones.

At this price range, it’s a bit more than a stocking stuffer, but it’s still a very cool idea. With the holidays coming up, it might be a great buy for your family get-together.