The new Inspiron design is a deviation from the series' recent plastic-heavy look, with a brushed-metal pattern on the wrist rest and keyboard tray. The back of the lid has solid glossy colours like blue, black, red, and pink with the round Dell logo. The chassis has a slightly tapered design that makes it a bit thinner on the front lip, but fairly chunky at the rear. The silver metallic wrist rest is offset by a matte-black keyboard. The keys are of the flat-topped, closely packed variety with a number pad that sit to the right of the keyboard. The keyboard features healthy-size keys that are comfortable to type. The touch pad has a new matte surface with basic multitouch gestures and two medium-size mouse buttons sit below it. The 15.6-inch display has a standard 1,366x768-pixel resolution which is fine for Web surfing, DVD playback, and online streaming.

You will find about a dozen preconfigured models of Inspiron 15R, which to be fair, cover just about every variation. This unit included a 2.26GHz Core i3, 4GB of RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive and Windows 7 Home Basic for a pretty decent price. The Core i3 version of the Inspiron 15R is more than adequate for everyday use. Upgrades are available for hard drives and basic discrete graphics too. The most interesting thing about the new Inspiron's ports and connections is that they're spread over three of the four edges of the system. The left side has an HDMI port, one USB, and audio jacks; the right side has the SD card slot, DVD tray, the USB/eSATA port, and the Ethernet jack; and the rear edge has the VGA port, power plug, and two additional USB ports. With its larger nine-cell battery (six-cell versions are also available), the Dell Inspiron 15R runs for an impressive 5 hours and 36 minutes of video playback. That's especially good for a midsize laptop.