Dell refreshes its Inspiron R line with thinner, lighter laptops and touchscreen

Dell refreshes its Inspiron R line with thinner, lighter laptops and touchscreen

Dell is hitting the reset button on its low-end laptops as it redesigns its Inspiron R line.

Engadgets reports that three budget laptops will be getting the makeover: the 14-inch (14R), 15-inch (15R) and 17-inch (17R) models. Each will get a little thinner and lighter as well as receive some upgraded components.

One of the biggest selling points is the optional touchscreen each model could get. However, a touchscreen will add a little heft to the laptops and their price tags.

Dell made the announcement during the CES hoopla. However, not all the details came to light during the show, like exactly when the line will be upgraded.

The weigh in

Both the 14R and 15R versions will weigh less than 5 pounds after the redesign and will be only an inch thick. The 17R will come in at 6 pounds and stand about an inch and a half thick.

The specs on these machines can vary pretty wildly with a lot of optional upgrades. There's a big gap between the base models and the fully tricked out laptops.

Each machine starts out with a Celeron processor, but can upgraded to a Core i3, i5 or i7 CPU.

Consumers can get up to 8GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage. But that huge amount of storage will have to be upgraded from the 320GB that come standard.

As for the graphics card, the 14R gets a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT640M and its bigger brothers each get a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 8790M.

Those graphics cards wil l show up on a 1,366 x 768 resolution screen on the 14- and 15-inch versions. The 17R comes standard with a 1,600 x 900 screen. Both the 15R and the 17R have 1080p display options as well.

The price could be right

There wasn't a ton of pricing info, but the 15R will start around US$ 430 and the 17R will begin at US$ 500. But most people will likely want to upgrade the base units' modest features, kicking up that price a little more.

And if you want the fancy touchscreen, it will raise the starting price of the 14R and 15R to about US$ 650. But even at that price, it will be one of the cheapest touchscreen laptops available.