Review: Dell’s Wireless Dock D5000 really does free your laptop from cables

Laptop docking stations can offer a perfect mix of productivity and convenience. They transform your portable computer (with its cramped keyboard, smallish display, and limited connectivity options) into a workstation connected to multiple monitors, a full-size keyboard, and oodles of connectivity options.

But the bad thing about notebook docking stations is that you can have a rough time disengaging the laptop from its dock. Connections at both ends—the dock and the laptop—tend to be fragile, and they can become unreliable over time.

Dell has a better idea: A docking station and a wireless network adapter card based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard—more commonly known as WiGig. Plug all your cabled devices—up to two displays, gigabit ethernet, keyboard, mouse, hard drives, and other USB devices—into the dock, and your laptop establishes a wireless connection to the dock. Your notebook doesn’t need any cables (unless it’s running on AC power). And since the combination operates on the 60GHz frequency band, it won’t interfere with your Wi-Fi network operating on the 2.4- and 5GHz bands.

ROBERT CARDINThe D5000 has a single USB 3.0 port on its front pane, along with an 1/8-inch stereo audio jack.

There’s just one significant drawback: Dell is offering the internal adapter card (the $37.50 Dell Wireless 1601 WiGig and 802.11n 2x2 Wi-Fi Half Mini Card) that’s required for pairing the notebook to the docking station as an option with only one laptop: the Latitude 6430u. You can’t buy the adapter card separately from the computer, so you can’t add it to a Latitude 6430u you might already own. And there are no third-party adapters that would enable you to use the D5000 with other notebooks.

That will change in time: A Dell representative told me the company “absolutely” expects to offer its WiGig adapter “with additional products in the coming months.” The spokesperson also said “the D5000 is fully standards-compliant,” which means it will work with future WiGig adapters from other manufacturers. When those will arrive is anyone's guess.

Still interested? Of course you are! Even if you have no intention of buying one, you must be curious to know how a wireless docking station performs. In my tests, it performed remarkably well. The D5000 has two video outputs (one is DisplayPort 1.1—which means there’s no support for multistream transport—and the other is HDMI 1.3), three USB 3.0 ports, one gigabit ethernet, and one 1/8-inch stereo audio jack.

I connected two 24-inch displays, one of which had native resolution of 1920 by 1200 pixels, and the other had native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. (Another bummer: The dock doesn’t support HDCP, so you won’t be able to watch copy-protected DVDs or Blu-ray discs.) I connected the dock to our corporate network, plugged in a Dell wireless USB transceiver (for a wireless keyboard and mouse) into one of the USB 3.0 ports. I connected a 1TB Seagate Wireless Plus hard drive into the second USB 3.0 port, and left the third vacant. If you don’t have a networked printer, that third USB port could be used for a printer, scanner, or any number of other peripherals.

ROBERT CARDINYou'll find two more USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.1, HDMI 1.3, and gigabit ethernet on the rear panel.

Dell says the D5000 delivers up to 10 meters of range (with the dock and laptop in the same room), but I found that claim wildly optimistic. I lost connection between the laptop and dock if I separated the two by more than six feet. Still, the fact that you can drive two displays and transfer files between a host PC and a docked hard drive without any wires is an impressive trick. If you’ve used a laptop with a conventional dock for any length of time, you know what a pain it can be to make that physical separation and connection over and over again. With the D5000 and the Latitude 6430u, you just pick up your notebook and walk away. When you come back to your desk, the system automatically reconnects and you can get back to work.

While I noticed very little video lag with the wireless dock, I wouldn’t recommend playing games on the system. Transferring files over the wireless connection was also significantly slower than when we hardwired a USB 3.0 hard drive to the notebook. When writing our single 10GB file to the drive using a hardwired USB 3.0 connection, we saw throughput of 99.2 MBps. When we wrote the same file to the drive via the D5000, the transfer occurred at just 31.5 MBps. Read speeds were even worse: 101.1 MBps hardwired versus just 47.4 MBps wireless. We had a similar experience when transferring our 10GB collection of files and folders: Write speeds went from 76.4 MBps to 41.5 MBps, while read speeds dropped from 93.9 MBps to just 44.2 MBps.

Of course you don’t have to subject yourself to that slow data-transfer speed. If you’re in a hurry, simply hardwire the drive to the laptop and go. I never found this necessary while I was using the combination. In terms of performance, the convenience factor far outweighs the sluggish wireless file-transfer speed.

This implementation of WiGig is awesome. The fact that you can use it today with only one notebook—and you can buy a WiGig adapter only when you buy Dell’s Latitude 6430u—is problematic at best. The Latitude 6430u happens to be a good Ultrabook, but it’s an older model that’s not available with Intel’s latest fourth-generation Core processor (Haswell).

Other manufacturers are expected to jump into the WiGig docking station pond eventually, so we’ll revisit this review as more products hit the market. For now, the D5000 has strictly limited appeal.

A lapsed musician, Michael is passionate about home and personal audio. He uses his home as a real-world test lab for evaluating consumer electronics and home control technology.
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Dell's Linux laptop has good hardware, decent toolkit

Plenty of specialized companies out there sell PCs with Linux, but Dell is one of the very few mainstream contenders to have done so over the years. After some spotty initial offerings, it's taken a different approach with its latest Linux PC. Rather than try to sell Linux hardware to the masses, which the company has said typically requires support, it's focusing instead on developers, a savvy group that tends to need less help.

That's the plan behind the $1,549 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, an ultrabook that was born via the company's “Project Sputnik” skunkworks initiative last year combining Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Long Term Support Precise Pangolin and the company's existing XPS 13 laptop.

What started out as a pilot project turned into a real commercial product last fall, and earlier this year it got a nice upgrade. We got our hands on one recently and put this latest model through its paces.

Visually, the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is a thing of beauty. It's thin, sleek, and lightweight, weighing in at just under 3 pounds. With a top cover precision-cut from a single block of aluminum, the silver-toned machine features a carbon-fiber composite base surrounded with a ring of matching anodized aluminum. A comfortable magnesium palm rest features soft-touch paint.

Powering the Linux ultrabook is a third-generation Intel Core i7 processor with Intel HD Graphics 4000, 8GB dual channel DDR3L RAM, and a 256GB SSD drive. That's a nice setup for the kinds of compute-intensive tasks developers spend much of their time on, including repeated cycles of coding, compiling, testing, and debugging.

Dell Inc.The XPS 13 Developer Edition we tested has a third-generation Intel Core i7 processor with Intel HD Graphics 4000, 8GB dual channel DDR3L RAM, and a 256GB SSD drive.

Developers will also often have many windows open, so the fact that this machine sports a full 8GB of RAM rather than the standard XPS 13's starting point of 4GB eases the burden by minimizing swapping to disk, thereby improving overall responsiveness.

The 13.3-inch edge-to-edge glossy display, meanwhile, is constructed from hardened Gorilla Glass and offers full High Definition WLED, 1080p resolution, and a full 178° viewing angle. So compact is the PC's design, however, that it actually feels a lot more like an 11-inch laptop in overall size.

The backlit, full-sized keyboard is another visually appealing element, though we found it a bit too light to the touch. That's personal preference, of course. Much more striking, though, was the fact that it featured a Windows superkey rather than an Ubuntu one.

While it's not a performance issue, the presence of a Windows-specific key on this device underscores the fact that this is still essentially Dell's standard XPS 13 with Ubuntu simply preinstalled. Developers wouldn't have any trouble doing that installation themselves, so we were alert to other distinguishing features that would set this device apart for this Linux-minded crowd.

One such feature is the XPS 13 Developer Edition's full year of included Dell ProSupport and onsite service after remote diagnostics. Also included on the device, meanwhile, are two USB 3.0 ports (one with PowerShare), a mini DisplayPort, and a headset jack. No mouse was included, so we added our own.

Like many Linux machines, this one featured a nice, snappy startup; it can boot from cold in as little as 13.5 seconds, Dell says.

We did encounter an issue by which the installer crashed the first time around, but on the second attempt it worked like a charm. WiFi connected on the first try, so we got to work installing some extras, including Chrome, GIMP, and Shutter for taking screenshots.

Katherine NoyesFeaturing the Unity desktop, Ubuntu 12.04 offers a user-friendly Linux experience.

We were both already familiar with Ubuntu and the Unity desktop, so that part was immediately comfortable. Since this machine is aimed at developers, however, we were particularly interested to see what developer tools were included. Those available upon startup were the Bazaar version control system, the IcedTea Web Control Panel, IcedTea Java Web Start, a printing configuration tool, and the UbuntuOne cloud service.

Handy for our review-writing purposes was that LibreOffice was installed and ready to go. Even more joy-inspiring was the absence of the vast array of OEM bloatware you'll typically find on most Windows machines.

We were surprised, however, to find no sign of two particular developer tools Dell has been talking about since the Sputnik project began. Namely, neither the cloud launcher nor the profile tool that have figured so prominently in the Developer Edition plans were evident on the laptop.

It turns out both are still essentially in alpha form and currently hosted on GitHub.

DellDell's widely anticipated cloud launcher and profile tool are not yet included on the XPS 13 Developer Edition.

Some initial work has been done on the profile tool, but Dell ended up taking a break to focus on launching the machine, it said. “We have just started up again,” the briefing notes explained.

The cloud launcher, meanwhile, “currently exists preinstalled as LXC + JuJu,” Dell noted. “We are working with OpsCode to create a Chef version as well.”

In the meantime, the XPS 13 Developer Edition comes with VirtualBox preinstalled as well as Juju, a transitional package for Ruby 1.8, Python, and more.

Is there a need for a machine aimed specifically at Linux developers? We're not so sure. Most developers are more than capable of stripping any machine of its original OS and installing what they want themselves.

That said, however, this is a decent start. With its i7 processor and 8GB of RAM, it's equipped to handle most of what developers will throw at it. In fact, the BIOS supports Intel-VT “bare-metal” hypervisor virtualization, lending itself to setting up virtual machine instances that run at near hardware spec performance levels, such as using Linux’s 64-bit kernel built-in KVM Type 1 hypervisor.

Typically programmers will set up their own “test beds” as virtual machines. Using Btrfs, for example, programmers can “snapshot” the virtual machine, make testing programmatic changes to the configuration, and if need be “roll-back” to the snapshot taken beforehand.

It was smart to go with a laptop here rather than a desktop, as developers tend to appreciate that extra flexibility. Some developers might not like the screen size, and the trade-off in weight of 2.99 lbs would probably not be the deciding factor in wanting one of these units. For anyone whose criteria included a larger display, this unit would drop off of the “short list.”

Meanwhile, Dell clearly knows that developers have their own unique preferences. The tool selection provided should be considered a starting point but not complete for any specific purpose. No two programmers have the same set of use cases and needs. Instead, what they look for are reliability and performance metrics. After all, many programmers write with operating-system-agnostic tools that can be used on any hardware platform.

The XPS 13 Developer Edition has competition: Lenovo’s ThinkPad, Apple’s MacBook Retina or Air, or Google's Chromebook Pixel. These machines aren't customized for Linux work, but they're technically superior in construction and software certification, and it's nothing for developers to strip what's there and install any operating system they want. It will be interesting, however, to revisit this device once it's fully loaded with all the developer tools Dell has planned.

Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers business and tech in all its forms, with an emphasis on Linux and open source software.
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Dietrich T. Schmitz is a Health Care IT Consultant based in New York. He can be found on Google+; a Perl Success Story for one of his projects is available on OReilly.com.
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Review: Dell’s UltraSharp U3014 delivers the big picture

A 30-inch desktop giant, the Dell UltraSharp U3014 offers resolution of 2460 by 1600 pixels on a matte IPS screen with environmentally friendly LED backlighting. The U3014 boasts several nice-to-have features and a long list of on-board controls for tuning your image on screen.

You might need to enlist some help in attaching the heavy monitor to its stand. But once you’ve done that, you can connect it to your computer using your choice of DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, or Mini DisplayPort.

The U3014's matte IPS panel has a very wide viewing angle, which is important for a display of this size.

The U3014 supports DisplayPort 1.2, including multistreaming, so you can daisy-chain two or more monitors and display independent images on each one (provided your video card also supports DisplayPort 1.2).

The U3014 also supports picture-in-picture mode, but only with certain combinations of connections. DVI and HDMI can't be used together, nor can the two types of DisplayPort connections (DisplayPort In is used only in daisy-chain scenarios). I was also surprised to discover that the monitor doesn’t scan all of its inputs on power-up, so I had to manually select the input I was using the first time. There is an input-scan button, but you must engage it by pushing a button.

Dell typically includes a four-port USB hub on its professional displays. This model sports two downstream USB 3.0 ports on its left side, along with a handy memory card reader, and two more downstream USB 3.0 ports (plus an upstream port) in the back. The display does not have built-in speakers, but you can attach Dell’s optional speaker bar to the bottom of the unit.

The display is calibrated at the factory for both color and brightness uniformity, but the U3014 offers a comprehensive set of onscreen menus if you’d like to make your own tweaks. The panel on which the U3014 is based is a “wide gamut” model, which means it’s capable of delivering more colors than you might be accustomed to seeing. To me, the U3014 rendered some colors so oversaturated that they looked fluorescent. An orange hat from DisplayMate’s test photos, for instance, look bright red on Dell’s monitor, while objects that looked lime green on other displays looked as though they’d been doused with a fluorescent-green highlighter pen. Photographs looked better, although skin tones looked too red, and a piece of orange furniture from my living room shifted toward red on the U3014.

Dell's UltraSharp U3014 is a bright and beautiful display with a host of video inputs, a USB hub, and a media card reader.

After consulting with Dell, I configured the U3014 to use the Adobe RGB color space, which provides a narrower gamut, and then Adobe sRGB, which uses an even narrower color space. These values helped rein in the colors. You can also manually adjust color-temperature values from the standard 6500K down to 5000K or up to 10000k, and you can independently adjust the hue, saturation, and sharpness. Finally, you can perform in-house calibrations using Dell’s UltraSharp Color Calibration Solution software with an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter (the hardware is sold separately).

All LCDs, including IPS panels, are somewhat susceptible to image retention. When a static image remains on the screen for a long period of time, a ghost image can remain behind. This usually isn’t a permanent problem—since LCD technology, unlike old-school CRTs, doesn’t rely on phosphors—but it can be distracting. If you detect ghosting on the U3014, you can push a button to launch an LCD Conditioning routine to get rid of the problem. I didn’t encounter any image retention during my evaluation, so didn’t have an opportunity to test this feature’s effectiveness, but you can typically avoid the problem by using a   screensaver or by allowing the display to go to sleep during longer periods of inactivity.

The U3014's matte IPS panel has a very wide viewing angle, which is important for a display of this size as you'll be looking off-axis at the top, bottom, and sides when you’re sitting directly in front of it. Glossy screens can render photographic images with richer blacks and shadows, but they’re also more susceptible to reflections and glare from lights and windows. In my work area, I experienced much less glare using the U3014 than with the Apple 27-inch Thunderbolt Display that I generally use.

With a 16:10 aspect ratio, the screen is just a little more square than the Apple Display, which has an aspect ratio of 16:9. The Dell is about an inch wider and 3 inches taller, and those extra few inches of real estate are very noticeable. I have four windows open as I write this, and I've found myself spending less time moving them around the screen as I switch between them.

Making the jump from a 27-inch display to a 30-inch display is a substantial investment: Dell's U3014 costs $500 more than either Dell's 27-inch U2713H or Apple's 27-inch Thunderbolt displays. And it's $200 more expensive than Dell's other 30-inch monitor, the UltraSharp U3011 (which has a less-sophisticated panel and supports only the older DisplayPort standard). But if you need a professional feature set in a very large monitor, The UltraSharp U3014 delivers.

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Deal of the Day: $200 Off Dell’s Vostro 3450 Laptop

If you’re on the hunt for a compact, standard business laptop and looking to save a few dollars, the Dell Vostro 3450 laptop with a backlit keyboard and fingerprint reader may be for you. Originally $884, this aluminum laptop is more than $200 discounted today. Get the Dell Vostro 3450 laptop today for $665.10 with free shipping through a deal with LogicBUY.

The 14-inch laptop comes in a sleek aluminum silver and comes equipped with 4GB RAM, 750 GB HDD, two USB 3.0 ports and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. It’s not the greatest of savings, but if you’re looking for a basic business device, it’ll do the trick.

Base specs: Intel Core i3 (2330M) processor, Windows 7 Home Professional 64-bit, HD LED anti-glare display, 8-in-1 card reader, mic, headphone, Bluetooth 2.1, DVD+/-RW optical drive, WiFi.

Dell Vostro 3450 14-inch 2nd Gen Intel Core i5 2.4GHz Aluminum Laptop for $665 through LogicBUY

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