Minimalist. The Dell D420 is one of the smallest and most mobile notebooks of the current Dell product lines. In the contrary to its competitors, Dell equipped the D420 with a WXGA display, which clearly contributes to the overview on the 12 inch display. The U2500 Core Duo processors combines good performance and low energy demand.

The D420 with the recognizable decent form and color design is representative for the Dell Inspiron business line. However, the word color is not really appropriate, you should rather call it gray levels.
The purpose of this simple and durable design is to avoid too much diversity in companies in order to deliver new notebooks without stirring up enviousness.  Unlike the bigger Latitude notebooks, this design does not let the clearly smaller D420 appear to be that heavy and bulky.

The notebook is designed very slim, which leads to missing out of an internal optical drive. In order to be able to use this notebook also for DVD playback, Dell offers a variety of solutions:

E.g., a number of docking options and notebook stands are available. An interesting alternative is the optional Media base, a docking station of notebook size, to which the bottom side of the notebook can be attached. Besides a DVD drive the Media base also provides you with additional ports like DVI, parallel and serial ports.

The keyboard of this mite surprises by its spaciousness. The whole width of the notebook is used and therefore most of the keys are full-sized. Only the size of the F-keys and the cursor keys were reduced. The D420 even has an enter key which extends over two rows.

However, the keyboard does not only score regarding its size, also typing feels alright. The single keys can be comfortably soft hit and the noise emissions are also alright.

The touch pad/track point combination of this notebook could not totally convince. The touch pad is relatively small, and somewhat intractable in use. Alike is the reaction of the track point, whose plastic cap is not really ergonomically formed, and provides hardly any feedback to the finger. Of course it is yet possible to configure the sensibility of the track stick and the touch pad depending on the user's needs.

Because of the very small dimensions, there was hardly any space left for additional keys. Still, the right side of the D420 provides you with a shapely power switch and a key for deactivating the wireless function.

The Dell Latitude D420 mainly aims at maximum mobility. This is not only observable because of its dimensions and weight. Also the hardware equipment contributes to this impression. E.g., a Core Duo U2500 processor, the energy-saving version of the Core Duo CPU, is used. Furthermore, the reviewed notebook was equipped with 512MB main memory. Up to 2GB are possible in this notebook.

At a clock rate of 1.2GHz the processors only demands 9.5 Watt and is yet sufficiently powerful for basic applications. An integrated Intel GMA 950 video chip is responsible for graphics.

Compared to the equipment of competitor notebooks, the weak hardware equipment of this notebook gets apparent. Still, we want to mention, that maximum performance was not the primary aim of the D420 and daily applications without high demands on calculation power should also not cause any problems.

Even a Reaction Quake game was no problem for the Latitude. However, you should forget about intensive game sessions, the 12 inch Dell XPS M1210 with Core 2 Duo CPU and Geforce 7400 video card was designed for these demands.

Even the 60 GB hard disk, a Toshiba MK6008GAH, of the reviewed notebook did not score high compared to others. However, you should consider that this is a 1.8" hard disk with 4200 revs. The review uncovered low transfer rate and average access times (compared to 2.5", 5400 revs models). A 80GB version of the 1.8 inch hard disk is also available.

Further information about the video card can be found here or in our comparison of mobile video cards. Detailed information about the Core Duo CPU can be found here.

Please also look at our benchmark list of mobile processors or at our benchmark list of mobile video cards, in order to compare this notebook to other configurations.