By Christina Samuda

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. But it lacks hotkeys above the keyboard and has only one USB port instead of the two that all of the other units in this category offer.

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-RW/DVD combo drive, and integrated wireless capability is a $149 option courtesy of a mini-PC Card.

With a 1.2-GHz 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.

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WHAT'S HOT: The Latitude C610, an update of another lightweight Dell business laptop, the C600, enjoys better battery life--almost 4 hours on one charge. And Dell corrected an annoying limitation of the C600: You can order the C610 with both standard modem and network connections and a wireless Mini-PCI radio built in. (Before, you had to choose between built-in traditional connections or built-in wireless, and add the other feature via a PC Card.)

Like its predecessor, the C610 caters to companies seeking a light portable suitable for sharing. It boasts a removable hard drive, both eraserhead and touchpad pointing devices, and a modular bay on the front that can hold any of a range of devices, including a travel module that drops the notebook's weight to 5.3 pounds (4.9 pounds if you order a unit with a four-cell battery instead of our review unit's eight-cell). The color icons that identify the rear connections make attaching peripherals easier

WHAT'S NOT: We have only a couple of minor beefs. Aside from an S-Video port you can use to attach the notebook to a TV, the C610 offers few multimedia bells and whistles. The stereo speakers sound only so-so, and there are no dedicated audio controls for playing music CDs.

WHAT ELSE: The C610 wears a slender dark case with a no-nonsense design. At this price, you get a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive that uses the same modular bay as the floppy drive. You can use both at once by attaching the floppy drive externally to the parallel port, using the included cable. Other bay options include a second 20GB hard drive, a Zip 250 drive, or a supplemental battery for stretching the C610's already impressive run time. It's easy to reach parts, especially the hard drive, which slides out of the notebook's side with the removal of one screw.

The C610's keyboard is quieter than the old C600's, and its eraserhead mouse buttons are more comfortable than the hard-to-press concave buttons on Dell's new all-in-one, the C810. Unlike most laptops these days, which bristle with quick-launch buttons, the C610 offers just one for jumping to your favorite Web site or application.

The C610's PC WorldBench 4 score of 99 is in line with the scores achieved by the other three notebooks we've tested with a 1-GHz Pentium III-M processor (733 MHz under battery power) and 256MB of RAM.

UPSHOT: The C610 should satisfy corporate buyers, as it offers just about everything a company needs in a highly flexible portable. It gives you built-in wireless readiness along with more-traditional networking connections; both eraserhead and touchpad pointing devices; and the ability to rotate multiple add-in devices, including a second battery.

-- Carla Thornton