Starting today, we're offering customers in the United States, Canada and Europe the Inspiron 1525 equipped with an optional Blu-ray drive under $1000. In the United States, that starting price is $879—specific pricing may vary in other regions.
The Inspiron 1525 laptop is the one that Laptop Magazine gave their Editors' Choice award to. It features a 15.4-inch 1280 x 800 resolution (or optional 1440 x 900) wide aspect display means it support up to 720p resolution. It also includes an HDMI port so you can connect it to a larger external display or HDTV.
If you're not familiar with Blu-ray, here's a blog post from Brian Zucker about that explains it in more detail. Back in mid-February, the blogosphere reacted to a Reuters story that said Toshiba planned to exit HD-DVD, the competing high-definition disc format. A few days later, they made it official. Since then, many new releases are coming out in the Blu-ray format, and places like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Blockbuster and Netflix are actively promoting Blu-ray titles.
The Blu-ray player disc drive is fully backwards compatible, and will play as well as burn traditional DVDs and CDs. And if you're willing to upgrade to Blu-ray burner drive, Blu-ray discs are good for backing up your personal files since they can store up to 50 GB of data, vs. 8.5 GB available on the typical DVD disc.