Dell Latitude C610 laptop

If you depend heavily on a notebook while in transit, you should take a serious look at the Dell Latitude C610, our Editors' Choice. Its crisp display, excellent performance, and outstanding battery life make it perfect for getting the job done on the road.

The notebook is housed in a sleek black casing, and at 6 pounds (system weight), it falls slightly above the middle of the pack. It has a 14.1-inch LCD and a keyboard with a quiet, soft touch, and there's enough surface area for your wrists to rest comfortably for extended typing sessions. The C610 includes both a touch pad and a pointing stick—a feature it shares with the Compaq N600c, HP Omnibook vt6200, and Toshiba Tecra 6100—and that's a definite plus.

The module bay in the front of the unit is hot-swappable, and switching drives or putting in a second battery requires simply pressing the lock switch located next to the bay. The standard unit comes with a CD drive, and integrated wireless capability is a $149 option courtesy of a mini-PC Card.

With a PIII-M processor, the C610 led the pack on Business Winstone 2001, beating out the two P4-M mainstream notebooks—the Omnibook and the Tecra. But the C610 truly distinguished itself on our BatteryMark test: It clocked 4 hours 24 minutes, almost an hour longer than the Omnibook's 3 hours 26 minutes and more than twice the Tecra's 2 hours 5 minutes.

The C610 has emerged as the workhorse among the mainstream notebooks here. And for those who rack up frequent-flier miles, this notebook is the ideal travel mate.