The underbelly of the beast
Here's a look at the underside of the M1210 with a couple of expansion panels and the battery removed.

The battery compartment is the long, recessed area at the bottom of the picture above. Inside of it, you can see the space for a SIMM card for mobile broadband/EVDO service (on the left) and the slot for the Bluetooth module (on the right). The SO-DIMM trapdoor is in the middle of the bottom panel, and the two communications slots reside under another cover to its right. As you can see, our review unit has a Wi-Fi card installed, but it lacks a WWAN card. Adding mobile broadband should be as simple as installing a WWAN card in the slot and putting in a SIMM card underneath the battery (and installing drivers and provisioning service and....)

The M1210 versus the Sharp M4000 WideNote
My own laptop, the trusty Sharp M4000 WideNote, has been our designated victim in a couple of these reviews now. It's an older system based on the Pentium M-era Centrino platform, but it's still a very nice near-ultraportable system. The Sharp's larger 13.3" wide-aspect display dictates a wider profile than the XPS M1210, but the dimensions are otherwise similar, as the pictures below illustrate.

There's no getting around the fact that the M1210 is smaller than the Sharp, even though the Dell is a little bit thicker overall. In fact, the M1210 feels very compact in the hands, and its 4.3-pound curb weight is not noticeably burdensome compared to the 3.7-pound Sharp.

I bring up the comparison to the Sharp for several reasons. One is the obvious size point of reference. Display size goes an awful long way toward determining a laptop's overall dimensions, and I consider the current crop of 13.3" wide-aspect laptops to be just about ideal. This size LCD maps almost exactly to the width of a "full-sized" laptop keyboard. With the M1210, Dell has had to pull the same trick as many makers of 12.1" ultraportables and put an unnecessarily large bezel around the screen, because a smaller chassis wouldn't leave room for a full-sized keyboard. Dell puts this space to some use by offering an optional webcam that fits into the top edge of the bezel, but there's no denying the screen is smaller than it has to be.

So, yes, I'm dissing 12.1" ultraportables. I hold out hope for a smaller, more ideal synthesis of screen and keyboard size than 13.3" systems like the M4000 WideNote, but for now, they look to be the best compromise.

The other relevant comparison to the WideNote involves not screen size but display quality. When used by itself, the M1210's display appears to be bright, sharp, and colorful. I'm a convert to glossy transreflective LCD coatings, and the so-called TrueLife variant from Dell seems to be as good as any. Put this system side by side with the Sharp, however, and the comparison reveals a large, unmistakable gulf in color contrast and accuracy between the two displays. The M1210 looks washed out next to the Sharp, and even slightly off-angle viewing—head-on, but with a little too much screen tilt in either direction—makes the situation worse. I may be especially sensitive to this since I happen to run a website with a funky blue background, but the blues look too bright and washed out on the M1210.

This is admittedly a very tricky photographic task, but I've attempted to get a picture of the M1210 and the Sharp side by side, so you can see the difference in color quality. I believe this picture is a fairly decent representation of how the two look in person.

The XPS M1210 (left) versus the M4000 WideNote (right). Click for a larger version.

The desktop backgrounds differ, but look at the browser windows. The backdrop on the Dell looks almost neon blue, and the picture of the servers has a bluish cast to it. I've shown these two laptops to various friends and family side by side, and they have all been able to see a clear difference in quality between the displays.

The simple explanation for what's going on here is that Dell probably used an LCD panel with 6-bit color precision in the M1210. 6-bit displays tend to have quicker refresh times, which can allow for watching video or gaming without any visible ghosting. But I've never noticed ghosting problems on the Sharp, and its color reproduction is markedly superior.

It may be a little unfair to compare this Dell to a Sharp, since Sharp makes some of the best LCDs in the world, but I'm sure Sharp would be willing to sell some of those displays to Dell for use in its laptops. The XPS M1210 is a premium product, and it delivers on almost every other front, but the display leaves something to be desired.

Now, let's watch the M1210 brutally crush the Sharp in some benchmarks.

How we tested
Most of the testing we do around here involves systems we've built ourselves out of parts. Since the XPS M1210 comes from Dell as a complete product with pre-configured software, we decided to test it more or less as it shipped. Fortunately, the M1210 wasn't entirely loaded up with shovelware, as is too often the case these days. We did decide to do like we would if we'd purchased the system and make a few changes. We uninstalled Google Desktop, turned off the Trend Micro security suite, and grabbed a video driver update from Dell, which took us up to the 6.14.10.4634 revision of Intel's GMA 950 drivers.

We're comparing the M1210 to a couple of older generations of Centrino technology using the results from our review of the Lenovo ThinkPad T60. The Sharp M4000 WideNote was tested with a 1.73GHz Pentium M processor, Intel 915GM chipset, 1GB of DDR2 533MHz memory, and a Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 hard drive. The ThinkPad T60 had a Core Duo T2400 processor, an Intel 945GM chipset, 1GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, and a Hitachi Travelstar 5K100. Both of these systems used the 6.14.10.4543 revision of Intel's graphics drivers.

All of the systems had Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 installed.