The Dell Inspiron 11 3000 Series notebook is a thin and light laptop with a low price tag and a reasonably fast processor. It also happens to be one of the nicer looking (and feeling) portable notebooks I’ve seen in a while.

Dell introduced the Inspiron 11 3000 Series laptop this week, and it’s expected to go on sale in October for $349 and up. I got a chance to spend a little time with one recently, and I was pleasantly surprised at what you get for the money.

Dell Inspiron 11 3000 Series

The demo unit I saw featured a 1.7 GHz Intel Pentium 3556U dual-core processor, but the cheapest model is expected to feature an AMD processor. Performance will likely vary depending on the guts of the system, but the unit I saw seemed pretty zippy for a cheap laptop.

It has a remarkably wide touchpad which felt good to my fingers, a full-sized keyboard that was easy to type on, and a touchscreen display. The laptop also has a soft-touch plastic finish that I’m kind of enamored with.

While I’ve seen a number of laptops that are said to have “soft touch” plastic, the Dell Inspiron 11 3000 Series case almost looks like metal, but feels more like rubber — and I mean that in a good way. It’s very easy to hold the closed laptop in one hand and there’s enough friction that you don’t worry it’s going to slip from your grasp.

The notebook measures 0.83 inches thick and weighs about 3.2 pounds. It has an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.0 port, HDMI and Ethernet ports, an SD card slot, and a headset jack.

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8 replies on “Hands-on with the Dell Inspiron 11 3000 Series notebook (starting at $349)”

  2. Very unenthusiastic processor. Dell should have opted for pentium or i3.

  5. I wonder if this will run league of legends even on lower settings. If so a definite buy for me.

  6. Brad, Saw your video on youTube. The Dell looks like an ASUS x202e. I wonder if the internals are the same, like on soldered on board RAM.

  7. This is the first non-gaming laptop to interest me in a while.
    I almost want to pick one up for work.
    Thanks Brad!!

  8. I’m hoping to see some fairly cheap low end Haswell based notebooks with small bezels and a matte non-touch 10″ display.

    I really like the matte lid. Something Asus should consider. The new (and old) Asus devices have really tacky looking shiny lids on notebooks and backs on tablets.

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