The Latitude X1 was designed with business travelers in mind, from its reinforced casing that wards off shifting airline baggage in the overhead compartment to a sealed keyboard that limits the damage caused by coffee spills. Dell reduced the size of the power adapter and battery to get down to a system weight of 2.5 pounds, which makes this system the lightest laptop in Dell’s arsenal.

An optional six-cell battery available with the system will provide up to six hours of battery life, but the system ships with a three-cell battery. The base configuration of the notebook costs US$1,699 with Intel Corp.’s Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage processor, 256M bytes of DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory, a 30G-byte hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, Intel’s 802.11b/g wireless networking chip, and a 12.1-inch wide-screen display.

Business customers can purchase the notebook with service plans that provide for next-day repairs within the U.S. as well as international plans that cover travel else where in the world, Dell said.

Ultraportable notebooks have remained a niche market in the U.S., despite their popularity in many other parts of the world. This has started to change in the last six months as Intel has introduced newer versions of its Centrino mobile technology, bringing down the cost of the older versions.

Rival PC vendor Hewlett-Packard Co.’s lightest business notebook weighs 3.5 pounds, but comes with the regular version of Intel’s Pentium M processor, which will outperform the Ultra Low Voltage versions. The HP Compaq Business Notebook nc4010 also comes with a six-cell battery.