Dell's Latitude range of corporate notebooks have been a long-term mainstay for many a business person on the move, offering a good balance of performance and battery power.

Dell has recently refreshed its Latitude series and new D620 sits in the middle of the range.

Our review sample came with an Intel T2500 Core Duo processor clocked at 2.0GHz; Dell currently offers the T2600 (2.16GHz) or T2400 (1.83GHz) as alternatives.

Backing this up is 1GB of PC2-5300 memory, although once again Dell offers other choices.

Clad in its matt silver and black finish, the D620 looks good, but weighing 3kg including the power adaptor it will start to tug on your arms if you carry it around all-day.

The screen is a 14.1in widescreen model and has a native resolution of 1,440 x 900, which provides plenty of desktop space.

This is a business notebook, so graphics performance is never going to be top of the agenda.

Having said that, the integrated Intel GMA950 chipset is perfectly adequate for all the usual business applications you might use.

The keyboard is comfortable to use with the keys having a good, solid feel when typing. Both a trackpoint and trackpad are built in with two mouse keys provided for each.

Disappointingly, the Trackpoint doesn't have a scrolling facility.

In between the two mouse buttons, below the trackpad, is something that's becoming more commonplace on business notebooks of late – a fingerprint reader.

This is joined by an integrated smartcard reader that will be welcome should security be a major concern.

Our review system had a strange, rubber-finished protuberance sticking out of the front. On closer inspection, this turned out to be the extended battery. In most cases, batteries tend to jut out of the rear of the chassis.

This battery includes a useful level meter, which saves you having to boot up the D620 to find out how much juice is left.

Wifi in the form of 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth are both built in. We also liked the wireless on/off switch that also doubles as a Wifi detector so, once again, you don't have to boot the system up to find out whether there are any local hotspots available.

There's no DVD writer, but the DVD combo drive is able to read DVDs and burn CDs.

The D620 also has an integrated 3G module built into it, something that Dell is planning to roll out across the whole of the Latitude range soon.

But, while the module is there, there are no drivers or software to control it at present – we're told these should be available soon.

In Sysmark 2004 SE, the D620 clocked up a score of 207, while the integrated graphics predictably restricted Far Cry to just 8fps (frames per second) and 632 in 3Dmark05.

The battery life of the D620 is worth noticing. In our tests, it achieved an impressive five hours and 10 minutes in Mobilemark 05's Productivity Test and four hours and 38 minutes in the DVD Playback Test.

For full performance results, check out our Reportlabs site.

If fast graphics performance isn't a concern, and for most business users it won't be, the Latitude D620 from Dell would be a good choice.