Dell Vostro V130

Dell is giving us the Vostro 130, a 13.3 inch with a matte panel, promising everything you could want from an ultra-portable laptop: decent performance, portability and battery life. So does it live up to its pretensions? Answers below!

Design and build: sober and practical

With its aluminium shell, the Vostro V130 offers a quality design. It's solid and well-finished overall. No glossy plastic here, even the screen surround is matte. No fear of leaving finger marks then!



The keyboard offers comfortable and relatively quiet keying. Those who do a lot of word processing will appreciate its well-proportioned keys. They allow you to type without looking at the keyboard and minimise mistakes.

The multitouch touchpad is of good quality and precise. The glide is fine (pleasant) though it certainly wouldn't have gone amiss to extend it a few centimetres.

The V130's webcam gives high quality results. The image is sharp and the colours relatively accurate. It handles video-conferencing no problem at all. It does however have a weakness: it could better handle movement, which tends to be a bit blurry.

To retain as slim a shell as possible, Dell has limited connectivity to the essential. On the right, there's an SD card reader and the headpones socket is at the front. The rest is at the back: the power socket, two USB 2.0 ports, a VGA out, an RJ45 port, an eSATA/USB 2.0 port and an HDMI out.

The fan is quiet. The only way you'll hear it is if you stick your ear right against the chassis, so it doesn't affect the space you're working in at all. Temperature levels are well controlled. Even when you put a lot of demands on it, the V130's temperature remains under the 40°C mark.

Processor power: good performance

With a dual-core Intel Core i3-380UM, the V130 offers a decent level of performance. It scores 52 on our index! This can be compared to 100 for our reference machine, the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi3650 (equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400).

In practice this 13.3 inch is perfectly at ease with multi-tasking usage and everyday office documents. Although it isn't especially designed for 3D modelling or photo processing, the time required for this type of activity is tolerable.

Note: the Dell is also sold with a Core i5-470UM processor. In this configuration, processing performance will be a notch above what you get with the i3-380UM. For the rest (gaming, battery life, HD video playback) it ought to be pretty similar.

High definition video playback (HD 1080p, Blu-ray equivalent) is no problem for the V130, whether using the processor or the built-in graphics chipset. Prefer the chipset to free up the processor for other tasks. For that, you'll just need software that supports the graphics card hardware decoding. This is the case with Power DVD 9 or Media Player Classic HC for example.

Windows 7 Family Premium edition (64-bit) takes 41 seconds to boot. It turns off in ten seconds.

The capacities of a netbook

With no dedicated graphics card, the V130 is no more able to run games than any other netbook. 

Audio: mono is back

Dell has adopted the same design as used by Apple on the MacBook Air, namely placing the audio under the keyboard. Except that with just one speaker, the Dell audio is in mono and not stereo as on the MacBook Air. Thankfully, the sound is clean, even when turned up high - everything is relative! The headphones out is also very clean.

Battery life: very disappointing...

We were disappointed by its battery life: 2h45 video playback isn't great for a laptop. The Macbook Air 13.3-inch gives 5h43 under the same conditions (Wi-Fi deactivated, headphones plugged in and brightness at 100 cd/m²).
When it comes to portability however, there's nothing to worry about. It slips easily into a rucksack or bag. Weighing 1.3 Kg, the V130 is sufficiently light to be carried around everywhere with you.