Dell to Offer Blu-Ray Slot Loading Drive in XPS M2010

Last week Dell announced that it would be offering a 500GB of storage on board their XPS M2010 and today the M2010 will also be the first portable PC to offer a 2x slot loading Blu-Ray optical drive.

The M2010 is a 20.1-inch widescreen portable PC with built-in high definition audio, so it's perfectly suited for the high def next generation media. Dell is a backer of the Blu-Ray technology so don't expect to see any HD-DVD support from the company any time soon. Toshiba and Microsoft are the major backers of the competing HD-DVD format. In terms of notebooks, Blu-Ray drives seem to be more available and winning the battle. Last year Dell first introduced Blu-Ray in the XPS M1710 17" gaming notebook. Sony and Alienware also now both offer notebooks with Blu-Ray optical drives.

Dell XPS M2010 (view larger)

Dell mentions in their statement regarding this release the following benefits of Blu-Ray

• Picture quality of up to 1080p high definition resolution at 40 Mbps
• Up to 50GB of optical disc storage, five times the capacity of DVDs
• Drive has backwards compatibility with CD and DVD allowing DVD and BD movie playback, DVD and BD authoring and CD, DVD and BD data burning