lol, you mean $50 for the 250gb upgrade not 450. And $570 is not an unreasonable price for a 256gb SSD upgrade, those things cost $700-$900 on their own (!).

I've been considering this laptop since just after it was announced (when my current/previous laptop died). I went ahead and pulled the trigger when it became available. I know it's lot for this blog, but $1000 is not a bad price for a good notebook, and you can get this thing darn well configured for that much. I need better than the atom (for simulations and virtualization), and want better than the ion (mostly for gaming, admittedly) – for me this is a fantastic system at a great price.

Anyway, it may not be a netbook, but I think it makes a great, high-end 'liliputer'.

Hopefully you can report back regarding the battery life when you get your laptop.

But I agree with gman about the weight of this computer. You could get a 13.3 inch system with similar weight (probably 4.5 pounds instead of 4.1 pounds) and with similar gaming chops. It would have a larger footprint, but it would also be a bit thinner.

Still, it sounds like they've made a niche product and you squarely fit that niche.

I have to agree with OpNickC about the SSD pricing. It will run you $800 to add the 256G SSD to a 13 inch Macbook Pro and others are similar. Many people think an SSD only lightens the load, but it is actually a viable performance upgrade. SSD's have much shorter access times than even 7200 RPM HDD's. This is especially noticeable with slower CPU's.

I haven't seen any 13 inch notebooks running as powerful a GPU as this one. The GT335M supports CUDA technology which means the GPU will take some of the load off the 1.3GHz processor.

I did notice that the specs page for the system quoted the DDR3 at 1066MHz, but it currently comes with DDR3 800MHz. This isn't a big deal, but I asked the folks at Dell about it and was told that it will be available with DDR3 1066 in the near future and they said they couldn't give me any additional details about the configuration.

It does make me wonder if they are going to move to the SL series core 2 duos. They will fit in the same socket as the SU and offer speeds up to 2.13GHz with a 1066MHz FSB. They do draw an additional 7 watts of power which will undoubtedly drop unplugged computing time of the current battery. It probably won't make a huge difference overall, but at least it shows Dell is still developing the system instead of releasing it and sitting back.