I'm about to buckle down on a few projects now that I have my new laptop up and running. But before I do, I thought I would
give you my take on it while it's fresh in my mind. I'm coming from a Dell Inspiron 9100 which is loud, hot, heavy, slow, and ugly.
So pretty much anything is going to be good. So it should come as no surprise that this thing is ultra quiet, cool (relatively), fast, and purdy.

Power button is front and center up top, the 3 buttons next to it are volume down, volume up, and mute.  It's got the nub, with a really comfortable nub cover that indents your finger far less.  The widescreen UXGA is great for fitting lots of code and apps on the screen, though at the default resolution of 1900x 1200 you can fit 6 BOTW directories on the screen.  Time permitting perhaps I'll design a website that takes advantage of all available real estate.  In any case, I ratcheted down to 1600 x 1080 (I think), and it's much better.

You can also lock your machine such that you swipe your finger along the scanner to unlock it (located in the middle of the left and right trackpoint buttons).   That doesn't come enabled by default so you have to remember to activate it if you want to use it.  There's a program installed called Embassy Security Center, that will get you started.

Its also got an ambient light sensor so it will adjust your display brightness automatically to how much available light there is, which is pretty cool. 

Battery life is supposed to be 6, but there's a warning in the BIOS that says your life will gradually decrease over time (as is the case with rechargeable batteries at this point in time).

The keys are more flush with the machine which is neat, and the action of the mouse buttons is more effortless than the inspiron.  So you don't have to click down as much to get the click to register.  That means a light touch gets you by and doesn't tire you out as fast.  It's very light and very sleek.

Firefox 2 crashes more though which I'm not happy about and as usual I had to adjust all kinds of settings - like "power off my network card when I close the lid".  Pretty annoying to be signed off AIM when all you want to do is prevent your offspring from playing around with your laptop.

The USB ports are on the *side* instead of the back, which is awesome, and it took far longer to copy stuff onto my memory key from the Inspiron then it did to copy it off.   There's much less background static when using headphones than with the inspiron (there was actually a big HUM with the inspiron) .  It comes with google desktop and toolbar preinstalled (though I still have yet to use google desktop), but since its in my taskbar I just might, the next time I need to search. 

There's a big docking port on the bottom for ease of docking, if you're into such things.  It also says "Strike Zone" where the hard drive is, which according to Dell: "...was designed and developed by Dell to protect your Latitude from damage and potential loss of important business data. Using a resonant vibration damper, Strike Zone helps absorb the shock, dispersing energy away from your hard drive in the event of accidental notebook drops and bumps."

It also comes with an intel core 2 duo processor and I've stuffed mine with 2 gigs of ram, being the power user that I am.  I'm fairly excited to open up my dozen-some-odd Visual Studio 2005 instances and see how she does in the multitasking department.

Off I go!