Perhaps that isn’t detailed enough, ok well I may as well talk through the unbox video first. The Duo was delivered to me today after several hours of excitedly looking out of the window whenever I heard a car coming down the road. The box itself is perfectly serviceable, but who cares about that? It’s what’s inside we’re interested in.
Opening the box reveals the netbook wrapped in a thin foam bag padded with blocks on the side with the box at the side containing the power lead. With that stuff out of the way let’s have a look at the Duo itself.
For the most part the Duo has a lovely rubberised feel around the screen bezel and the main body, the back of the screen is glossy, patterned and is of course emblazoned with the Dell logo.
My first thought is that it looks better than it does in the various preview videos and reviews I’ve seen so far. On the underside we find a detachable flap under which are the Windows license stuff and a sim card reader which, if you have a 3G sim, will allow the Duo to access the 3G network.
The Duo has minimal ports on the body with 2 USBs and a headphone jack on the side hidden under 2 flaps with the power socket next to those. The tiny grill you can see to the right of the USB flaps is one of the speakers.
The port on the underside is for the JBL speaker dock which is sold separately and which I haven’t bought.
Opening the Duo up reveals a lovely chiclet style keyboard, which has a lovely solid feel to it and is very pleasant to type on, and the mouse tracker and mouse buttons which again are very nice to use.
Then we come to the main feature of the Duo, the screen, which displays 1366x768 meaning the Duo can display 720p HD video. It looks terrific, the much talked about issue with the screen visibility angle is unfounded in my opinion, it is as good as most others I have seen though not in the same league as Apples latest.
Having spent a little time playing with the Duo after it had booted and run through the first use setup I must say I am very happy, the touch screen is nice to use, flipping the screen is a great novelty which I will take some time to tire of and, once in tablet mode, the gestures and Dells own overlying software is serviceable, I have a slight problem with the idea that you can’t change the Icon functions or which programs they link to (I would rather my internet button opened Chrome rather than IE) but this is rumoured to be attended to in Dells first update to the software next year .At £480 it isnt’ cheap but for the “most powerful tablet in the world” it’s not bad at all, though really it’s not a tablet, but I still bloody love it.
