Launched some months ago, the Dell Vostro 3300 is a stylish, good-looking 13-inch business laptop. Not only does it have a fashionable, sophisticated all-metal exterior, the Vostro 3300 also offers very good performance in its compact shell.
Design
The new Dell Vostro 3300 borrows design elements heavily from the Dell Adamo XPS ultraportable laptop and the Dell Vostro V13 thin and light laptop. Needless to say, Dell’s previous fashion statement with the slim Vostro V13 laptop is accentuated with the new Dell Vostro 3300 laptop even more. The 13-inch business laptop’s available in three colors — Aberdeen Silver, Lucerne Red or Brisbane Bronze — and its all-aluminum exterior has a smooth finish and feels elegant and premium on touch. The Dell Vostro 3300 is wrapped in aluminum on its screen lid and along its side, but the metal casing doesn’t extend to the laptop’s bottom. Prop the laptop open and you’ll see the Vostro 3300 sports an all-black keyboard deck, palmrest, and touchpad — the laptop’s two toned silver-black color scheme looks stylish and attractive to say the least. Like the Vostro V13, the Dell Vostro 3300 isn’t top-heavy and exquisitely balanced — you can lift the laptop’s screen lid and prop it open with a single finger, without pulling its chassis along the way. The Dell Vostro 3300 is a very well built laptop, with its 13-inch screen firmly supported by two hinges placed along the laptop’s spine.
Unlike the Vostro V13, the Dell Vostro 3300 doesn’t have a protruding spine — but comes with a tray-loading DVD writer driver on its left edge. The slim, compact, 13-inch Dell Vostro 3300 business laptop weighs just 2-kg with a four-cell battery — not as ultraportable as the Vostro V13 or the Lenovo Thinkpad T400s, but it’s not at all heavy. It’s a road warrior, the Dell Vostro 3300 — with its durable build quality and slim, relatively light profile. And with its premium aluminum enclosure, the Vostro 3300 laptop will surely make heads turn whether you’re in a boardroom or sitting in a lounge.
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Given its configuration, the Dell Vostro 3300 laptop pretty much cements its place as a no-nonsense, high-powered portable computer.
Usability
The Dell Vostro 3300 offers very good day-to-day usability options. It has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit screen which supports a screen resolution of 1366×768 pixels. But more importantly the Vostro 3300′s 13-inch screen is matte or non-glossy in nature, and supports anti-glare to prevent reflections from popping into your screen’s workspace. The Dell Vostro 3300 laptop’s matte screen is nice and bright (brighter than the Lenovo Thinkpad T400s’ screen) and very well equipped for reading text for extended hours — it can also handle an occasional movie thrown its way. A 2MP webcam sits recessed on the screen’s top screen bezel, and it’s great for video chatting. You can also capture videos and upload them to YouTube or share pics by uploading them on popular photo-sharing sites like Photobucket, etc., through the Vostro 3300′s proprietary Dell Webcam Central software.
The Dell Vostro 3300′s laptop keyboard and touchpad are the pretty much the same as on the Dell Vostro V13. laptop keyboard sports well-sized keys that are tightly packed on the keyboard deck and well laid out. The keys on the Vostro 3300 are shaped differently compared to the keys on the Thinkpad T400s, but they are equally nice to type on — there’s no time wasted in getting into your typing groove on the The Dell Vostro 3300′s laptop keyboard. What’s more, much like the Apple MacBook Pro 17-inch, the Vostro 3300′s keyboard is backlit and spill-resistant like the Thinkpad T400s’. The touchpad is sized identical to the one on the Vostro V13 and sits in a shallow area surrounded by the palmrest and keyboard. The touchpad has a very fine textured finish — almost smooth but not quite — and is gesture-enabled (pinch for zoom, flick to scroll through pages, etc.). We had absolutely no complaints from the Dell Vostro 3300′s touchpad — it provided very good tactile feedback and its gesture-enabled motion worked flawlessly.
Port placement is also well thought out on the Vostro 3300 — card reader and audio ports are located at the front edge. We also like a strip of touch-sensitive multimedia buttons located above the laptop’s keyboard.
Hardware Features
The Dell Vostro 3300 is a very well featured laptop in terms of internal hardware. With an Intel Core i5-520M 2.4-GHz processor (with Intel Turbo Boost and Hyper Threading technology), 6GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce 310M discrete graphics card (512MB), the Dell Vostro 3300 laptop pretty much cements its place as a no-nonsense, high-powered portable computer. The Dell Vostro 3300′s internal hardware is better than the recently reviewed Lenovo Thinkpad T400s’.
You also get a host of connectivity options and ports on the Vostro 3300 laptop. There are three USB 2.0 ports on the Dell Vostro 3300, one of which duals up as an eSATA port — in case you have to connect an external hard drive for data transfer. All three USB ports are powered, meaning you can charge USB-powered devices (phones, cameras, MP3 players, etc.) through them. The 13-inch business laptop also integrates faster communication standards like Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and Bluetooth 2.1 wireless connectivity. The Dell Vostro 3300, like the HP ProBook 4520s or any self-respecting business laptop, integrates a fingerprint reader — placed near the top right of the laptop’s palmrest. Apart from the regular offerings of a 5-in-1 multicard reader, ExpressCard slot, audio in-out and VGA ports, the Dell Vostro 3300 misses out on an HDMI port — we would have loved for the laptop to have an HDMI port but since its primarily aimed at businesses, we think it isn’t that important.
The Vostro 3300 also comes with a SIM card slot under its battery compartment (like the Lenovo Thinkpad T400s) — it’s useful for connecting to wireless 3G and WWANs.
Bundled Software
Dell bundles 64-bit Windows 7 Professional edition operating system with the Vostro 3300. Dell doesn’t compromise on business users’ data and it deploys data security and recovery tools on the Vostro 3300 laptop. As we saw on the Dell Inspiron 14R laptop, Dell DataSafe Online (a convenient way to save your data on to the cloud) works much the same way on the Dell Vostro 3300 as it did on the Inspiron 14R laptop, providing you an easy way to upload and share photos, videos, and other files securely on to your own private data vault on the Web. Dell also has a backup and recovery tool packed in with the Vostro 3300 which is a nice way to safeguard your data. The fingerprint reader on the Dell Vostro 3300 is accompanied by a DigitalPersona software, which guides you through enrolling your fingerprints. Once that’s done, you can login to Windows, websites and applications by just swiping your finger — no passwords required!
Performance
The Dell Vostro 3300 is one of the fastest 13-inch laptop we’ve tested. The business laptop just aced all our synthetic benchmarks with very high scores — 111 on WorldBench 6, 7100 on PC Mark 05, and 8195 on CineBench, respectively — better numbers than any of our Top 5 Mainstream Consumer Laptops. With a 3D Mark 06 score just under 4,000, and if the rigors of work call for a stress-busting activity, you can also do some casual gaming on the Dell Vostro 3300 — we had no problem playing FarCry 2 at high settings on the laptop’s Nvidia GeForce 310M graphics card.
With the fast Core i5-520M processor, ample 6GB RAM, faster 7200rpm hard drive, and a pretty good graphics card, you will not encounter any bottlenecks while multitasking with your work programs on the Dell Vostro 3300. You can also watch a DVD movie or high-def 720p or 1080p HD files on the Vostro 3300 — the movie playback’s smooth and stutter-free, even though the matte screen doesn’t make color and visuals pop as compared to a glossy screen. The onboard single speaker on the Vostro 3300 is modest at best by laptop standards — we recommend plugging in headphones for best results. Owing to its metal exterior, the V3300 laptop heats up a bit — especially near the right palmrest, and prolonged usage on the lap’s uncomfortable. But the heat isn’t as perceptible while working on the Dell Vostro 3300 when it’s perched on a desk.
Battery life is the only blemish on an otherwise stellar performance by the Dell Vostro 3300 laptop. The 13-inch business laptop ships with a 4-cell battery by default, with the option of bumping it up to an 8-cell version. In our synthetic battery test — at full-screen brightness, bluetooth turned off and at Windows 7′s high performance preset — the Dell Vostro 3300′s 4-cell battery lasted for exactly 1 hour. In real-world usage — surfing the Web over Wi-Fi on power save battery mode — we managed to time just 2 hours 30 minutes from the Vostro 3300′s 4-cell battery. If you will predominantly use the Vostro 3300 indoors, this shouldn’t be a huge concern; but if you’ll be travelling a lot with the slim, light 13-inch Dell Vostro 3300 laptop then you should seriously invest in the 8-cell battery.
Bottom Line
All said and done, the Dell Vostro 3300 laptop is a sophisticated 13-inch business laptop, combining elegant style with top-notch performance. The Dell Vostro 3300 is decently priced for a business laptop — it’s available for as low as Rs. 36,000 but our review sample’s configuration sells for a price of Rs. 50,000. It offers much better performance than the Dell Vostro V13, Lenovo Thinkpad T400s, and HP ProBook 4520s, comes with a nice feature set and security software tailored for business usage. If you run your own business or are part of a small organization craving for a premium-looking, stylish compact 13-inch business laptop which is thin and light with excellent performance, we highly recommend the new Dell Vostro 3300.