It’s easy to find a notebook that’s good at the basics. But what if you want to edit photos and video? Or multitask without your laptop wheezing? Enter the Dell Studio 15 (1558), an excellent multimedia machine under $900 for people who want to do more. We love its comfortable keyboard, high-resolution webcam, strong performance, rich sound, and long battery life. Gamers might want to look elsewhere, but everyone else should be well satisfied.

Design
While the Studio 15 eschews many current design trends—matte or metallic surfaces, island keyboards—it’s nonetheless attractive and comfortable. Both the lid and keyboard deck have a glossy surface, but neither picks up fingerprints. That’s partly because although they’re glossy, they still have a flatter finish than other reflective lids. Also, a subtle circular pattern, echoed on both the lid and palm rest, helps mask smudges.



While the palm rest is gray and the keyboard, black, the lid comes in a variety of colors, including pink, green, purple, red, and blue (as is Dell’s wont, you’ll pay $40 extra for colors other than black; when you purchase it in pink, Dell donates $5 to the breast cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure).



One of the other things that makes the Studio 15 a pleasure to use is that rather than cluttering up the chassis with touch-sensitive controls, it built the multimedia controls into the row of function keys, just as Apple does with its Macs. Our only gripe: the hinge, which contains the speakers, is wide, and pushes the display farther back than we’d like.

The 9-cell battery on our configuration creates a bulge on the bottom of the laptop, making the notebook (a reasonable six pounds) slightly awkward to carry and a relatively heavy 6 pounds. Those who care more about looks and portability than endurance should stick with the 6-cell battery.

Keyboard and Touchpad
The Studio 15’s keyboard is one of our favorite things about the Studio 15. Sure, its closely spaced, terraced keys aren’t as stylish as a chiclet keyboard, but with a soft finish they’re very comfortable to type on. In fact, we smashed our long-time record of 88 words per minute on the Ten Thumbs Typing test, pounding out 94 words per minute with a one percent error rate. And while we usually have to pause to find the Shift key or the question mark, touch typing felt seamless with the Studio 15.

The touchpad, whose surface has very little friction, also doesn’t draw much attention to itself (that’s a good thing). The touchpad is a little small for pinching and zooming, one of the enabled gestures, but scrolling along either the right or bottom edge of the trackpad felt pretty natural. We like that if you go to Control Panel > Mouse > Dell Touchpad, you can use Dell’s own intuitive interface to enable or disable gestures, and customize how responsive the trackpad is.



Ambient Heat
Even after extended use, the Studio 15 ran at pretty normal temperatures. For instance, after playing a Hulu video at full screen for 15 minutes, we observed temperatures of 91 degrees on the touchpad, 90 degrees at the center of the keyboard, and 97 degrees on the underside (that temperature rose to 102 degrees when we moved to the front center of the bottom surface). When you think that the average laptop in this weight class measures 90, 93, and 98 degrees in the same spots, you realize the Studio 15’s temperatures are reasonable, if not slightly cooler than other notebooks.