Dell Vostro V131 13 inch laptop review

The Dell Vostro V131 is Dell’s latest addition to its small business range. It’s a 13.3 inch, very portable and smartly designed device aimed at mobile businesspeople who are unlikely to see a power socket for most of their working hours. It features Intel’s i3 or i5 processors and a 4-cell or 6-cell battery. Our review model came with 4 Gb RAM, Intel i3-2310M CPU and a 6-cell battery.

What we like best

We’re big fans of the Vostro design anyway, and the Dell V131 is firmly in that mould, too. The lid is covered by a matte aluminium finish with a thin black strip at the top, while the inside bezel is matte black plastic (as is the area surrounding the keyboard). The keys are a tasteful grey, with alternative orange symbols and a thin stainless steel ring around the keyboard changing things up a bit.

The battery case sticks out at the back and provides a slight elevation for a good typing angle. We would have thought we’d mind the protrusion at the back a lot more than we do – it doesn’t look clunky at all.

The Dell V131 has all the features a good office laptop needs: a very good webcam, which works great in tandem with the pre-installed Skype (good for video calls), a bright, matte screen, decent security (fingerprint identification and pre-installed Trend Micro Business Security software) and good connectivity options (WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0).

The Dell Vostro V131 in the PC Site office

The trackpad is excellent, although the keyboard’s somewhat soft feedback will take some getting used to. The space bar in particularly felt disconcertingly loose.

Processor-wise, the Vostro V131 is well-equipped: We had multiple browser windows opened, streamed an online radio channel and a YouTube video simultaneously and conducted a short Skype conversation all at the same time, and even with the lower CPU option we didn’t encounter any lagging or freezing.

We watched a generic HD nature clip which looked very good – decent contrast, sharp shapes and lively colours. The Dell Vostro V131 is also a trusty travel companion – battery life at medium brightness and continuous video playback was four hours and five minutes. It booted up in 17 seconds from hibernation and in four seconds from sleep, so in case you need to look something up quickly you’ll be sorted.

What we like least

As you might expect from a business laptop, the speakers aren’t up to much. We played Reese & Santionio’s techno classic “The Sound”, and winced a bit at the sheer tinnyness. But since the V131 won’t be your soundsystem, this is a minor fault.

The build around the keyboard gave in to manual pressure too easily for our liking, as did the lid. We didn’t get the impression you could carry it around without fear of dropping it.

A bit more annoying was the fingerprint scan function, which was easy enough to set up but was frustrating when actually trying to log on – it almost always took more than two tries for it to work. The screen also gave off more glare than expected, which is a bit weird for a non-reflective display.