Dell’s Inspiron 11 3000: A $199 laptop with intriguing upgrade options

Now that I'm a few days removed from the noise of CES, I've had some time to think more about everything I saw at the show but couldn't write up at the time. One of those things was Dell's new Inspiron 11 3000, a series of multicolored plastic Windows laptops that start at $199.

To be fair, sub-$200 Windows laptops have been a thing for a while now, and they aren't going to be very exciting to tech enthusiasts ("oh, they're just netbooks," sneered someone within earshot of me at Dell's display table. He's not wrong, really). And the base $200 configuration of these isn't doing anything that HP's Stream 11 or Acer's Cloudbook isn't already doing. The base model still uses a low-end Atom-derived Celeron processor (the model and core count wasn't disclosed), 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, all of which will make it unsatisfactory as a primary computer.

What's interesting about Dell's take on the new-wave netbook is that you can actually configure it with a wider variety of components, where its primary competitors offer very limited upgradeability or none at all. The 32GB of flash storage can be upgraded to either a 500GB spinning hard drive or 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM and 802.11ac Wi-Fi options will be available, and you can upgrade to an Atom-derived Pentium CPU (though again, we don't know anything about core count or clock speed, so it's hard to say how much of a speed increase this will provide).

What we don't know is whether users can perform aftermarket RAM, wireless, and storage upgrades themselves, which would be a big selling point since neither the Stream nor the Cloudbook are user-upgradeable. Based on the floor models I saw at CES, they should be able to fit standard 7mm-tall 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs, but it's not clear whether the memory is soldered to the motherboard or not. Dell doesn't have more information to share with us right now but is planning to lend us a review loaner when it has some to send.

As for the off-the-shelf configurations, pricing remains crucially important and totally mysterious. This is still an all-plastic laptop with an 11.6-inch 1366×768 TN display with mediocre color and viewing angles. The keyboard, while it feels good for the price, has less satisfying key travel than what you'd find in more expensive models, and the trackpad is the same way. And even a top-end configuration with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD will be on the slow side, though it will be fast enough and provide enough storage to actually serve as a primary system if you wanted it to. If a fully specced version costs twice what the base model does, it will become much less appealing, but Dell hasn't disclosed what the various configuration options will cost.

The laptops use an all-plastic design that feels and looks good for the price, but while the colors are attractive, the glossy, all-plastic lid of the laptop shows fingerprints easily (as the above photos demonstrate). You get one USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.0 port, one full-sized HDMI port, a headphone jack, and a microSD card slot, so connectivity is on par with what other companies are offering. It should also be said that these laptops are a step down in some ways from previous Inspiron 11 3000-series laptops, which featured higher-quality flippable touchscreens and faster Intel Core CPUs but cost nearly double what this new model does. 

We don't have a specific launch date for this laptop, but it should be available soon. If the price is right (and/or if it can be upgraded after you buy it), it will be an interesting alternative to some of the other super-cheap Windows laptops that have launched in the last year or two. We'll be taking a closer look when we get one in for review.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham