The Macbook Air, which being a Mac is a PC for people who don’t really know what they want to do with it, has dominated the concept with sleek looks and decent specifications, but mostly the looks.

That is up until now with Dell releasing the XPS 13. Dell is noted for being the high end purveyor of laptops – with high quality design and parts, coupled with a high price.

The XPS 13 is no exception to this – the design is sleek and rugged, while the solid state hard-drive promises quick boot-up times.

The screen is slightly disappointing. 720p on Gorilla glass is still reasonable for watching a movie, but expect to have to do so alone as the screen doesn’t support a wide angle of viewing.

Ultrabooks trade power for portability. That said 4GB of RAM should see most work applications running fine, provided you can get them onto the system, just don’t expect to use this for gaming.

Its Wi-Fi compatibility is reasonably good – but it has become a bit of a standard thing with a lot of computers. Blue tooth is nice though.

The keyboard is surprisingly comfortable to use, feeling satisfying deep. The backlight doesn’t hurt in the looks department either.

The one major weakness the system has is that it doesn’t have much in the way of ports. The XPS 13 has one USB 2 port, and one USB 3 port, and that is about it. You are going to have to use your own card reader.

It was a bit strange that the system came with some DVDs – I suspect it is tradition because the system does not actually have a DVD player.

Overall, it is precisely what I would expect from a Dell ultra-book, well made and an excellent piece of hardware. 

Check out the full specs here