【Down Town】

With the madness of CES lurking around the corner,Down Town some tech manufacturers are jumping the gun and sharing some of their new wares a few days early. On Thursday, Dell announced a number of products, the most interesting of which is the new XPS 13 laptop.

Anyone who's ever seen the previous iteration of Dell's flagship 13-inch laptop probably thought the same thing: It's really nice, but what's up with that chin? The Dell XPS 13 of yesteryear had great specs and a beautiful display with ultra-thin bezels on all sides — except the bottom, where the bezel was absolutely huge.

Well, just like on the 2-in-1 version of the XPS 13, that massive lower bezel is a thing of the past. The new Dell XPS 13 comes with a 16:10 screen ratio, which makes it taller than before (the previous XPS 13 had a display with a 16:9 ratio). It sounds like a small change but it's absolutely huge in the context of this laptop, which is one of the best and lightest 13-inch laptops on the market.

The new, 13.4-inch display is 25 percent brighter than before, and its top bezel hides another new feature: It now hosts an infrared camera besides the webcam, allowing for Windows Hello face unlock.

Overall, the new XPS 13 is lighter and thinner than ever (it weighs 2.9 pounds, or 1.33 kilograms, in all configurations), and Dell says the touchpad is larger and the keyboard is improved compared to previous versions of the product.

As is typical for Dell, the XPS 13 comes in a vast variety of configurations. It starts at $999.99 with a 1,920x1,200 screen resolution, a 10th-gen Intel Core i3-1005G1 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, but it can also be had with a 4K screen, an i7-1065G7 processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which costs $2,149.99.

The Dell XPS 13 is available in white and black, and it will be available in the U.S., Canada, Sweden, UK, Germany and France on Jan. 7, with global availability starting in February . There will also be a Developer's Edition of the XPS 13 with pre-installed Ubuntu, starting at $1,199.99. That variant will come to the U.S., Canada and "select European countries" in February.

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