Just purchased the e5520...

I thought the difference was in function, not aesthetic.

But I'm still very excited for it.

First business grade laptop I've owned.

Edit: Sorry for repeating myself, thought the edit I made to my previous post didn't save but apparently it did.

 

I too recently bought the E5520 and have owned it for about a month. So far, it's been great! The FHD screen is bright, has good contrast, and is very sharp. I hate gloss displays so this was a definite positive for me.
I bought mine with the less beefy i5-2520 processor since it's really only going to be used to handle all my med school stuff and I don't anticipate needing that much processing power. The screen, Intel 6300, and processor were the only three "upgrades" I bought from Dell. They upgraded my HDD to 7200rpm by mistake and then I also upped the RAM to 4GB. Total cost for me was $840 when everything was said and done.

Keyboard feedback is excellent. The touchpad is a bit too sensitive at its native settings (reacts to my palm too much) but you can adjust its sensitivity in the software. Construction is very solid. I don't notice any flex anywhere on the keyboard or base (except for the DVD drive area). There is some screen flex but I have to press pretty hard on the cover to get any ripples on the screen. Taking off the single panel on the bottom reveals all the components so its easy to swap out the hard drive, memory, processor, wifi, etc. Build quality in my opinion is excellent and on-par with, if not better than, Thinkpads or other business class notebooks in this price range.

The palmrest will get a bit warm after a while and the fan, while normally off/spinning very slowly, has an annoying habit of ramping up rapidly whenever the processor gets too warm. For me, this can happen at any time. I really think Dell should reconfigure the fan settings in BIOS to just spin at low RPM all the time so it doesn't ramp up.

Battery life is very reasonable for the components. With screen brightness at about 1/3 (comfortable level for me) I get about 4 hours with web surfing + Pandora and several clones of OneNote open.

I hope this gives you some idea of what the laptop will be like. Cheers!

 

Thanks for the mini-review, definitely pumped me up a bit more.

Yeah I wanted this machine for the build quality. I was actually using an Alienware m17x R3 for the tasks I'm going to be using this for.

I began noticing in my office at work I was worrying a bit too much about keeping my laptop clean and pristine, because the matte rubber finish on the R3 isn't quite rugged enough for business use. While it's not a very heavy laptop, it was also a bit too bulky for easy transport.

Thinking about all that prompted me to sell it and pick up this Latitude. The key thing I did was keep the 256GB SSD from my R3 to stick in this Latitude.

 

So I'm typing this from my freshly arrived e5520 and I have to say I absolutely LOVE IT.

It has to be one of the sturdiest and best built laptops I've ever used (second only to my m17x R2 tank) and the overall build quality is just beyond my expectations.

The ultrasharp matte display also blew away my expectations. I'm very picky with my screens, I have an RGB on my R2 and I've returned several laptops for having subpar displays. This one is really beautiful. Excellent contrast and decent enough coverage of sRGB, it's way better than any of the displays on the Alienware line currently and than many other displays I've used recently.

It's not quite the incredible B+RG on the XPS 15 (and Sager models), but it's definitely good enough.

The keyboard has a fantastic typing feel to it (can't wait to type that thesis now!) and the trackpad/point is responsive enough.

I'm just really impressed by the quality of this laptop. From my limited tests, the dualcore i7 is also blazing and temps are definitely reasonable. Not to mention I can do some light gaming on the HD 3000 because Intel finally stepped their integrated graphics game up.

Awesome stuff. Very happy with my purchase.

 

Also, the SSD install was a breeze and I finally got around to making a bootable USB drive with W7Pro on it.

I'm totally stunned by how fast a USB windows install went on the SSD.

 

Hmm. I was hoping to play some Minecraft on this machine, but it's running horribly. I thought the HD 3000 integrated chip was capable of playing Arkham Asylum with decent settings, and it can't seem to handle Minecraft? I'm using the latest HD driver from Dell (because the newest one from Intel breaks the OSD) on high performance settings.

I'm a bit surprised here.

Also, you can't use the mousepad while holding one of the keyboard buttons, so you can't move and look around.

Any ideas?

Clearly this isn't a gaming notebook, but I'm somewhat surprised by these two points above.

 

What settings are you running minecraft at?

Does it run better if you decrease the render distance?

 

It does, but it's not exactly smooth. I'm wondering if it's more of a driver issue. HD 3000 should be more than enough to run Minecraft maxed out.

Hell, I can load Rift on this and play it.

 

Try turning off "Advanced OpenGL" if it's on.

 

It's off, but thanks for the suggestion.

Minor issues aside, this truly is one of the nicest laptops I've ever owned. I can't say it enough, I love the build quality. This keyboard is also PHENOMENAL.