Hands On: Dell Latitude 10 Windows tablet with removable battery

Dell has unveiled the Latitude 10, the first Windows 8 tablet to have a removable battery.

The new Latitude 10 will be aimed at businesses, but the tablet will be attractive to home users too. Unlike every other Windows 8 tablet we've seen the Latitude 10's battery won't be sealed and can be easily replaced. Annoyingly it looks like you will have to shut Windows down or be connected to a wall socket when swapping batteries. Another cost of this flexibility is weight – at around 700g it will be 100g heavier than other competing tablets.

Read more: Windows 8 news | Tablet reviews

The understated black design is coated in a soft grip rubber for a more secure grip. The pre-production model we saw flexed under more pressure than we'd like, but this may change with the final models due at the end of October.

Oddly, the Latitude 10 won't come with a keyboard dock as standard, although an iPad-style Bluetooth keyboard case will be available. Another optional accessory will be a desktop docking station with extra ports, such as Ethernet.

The Latitude 10 will come equipped with one of Intel's latest Atom processors so it will run existing Windows software. It'll be 10mm thick, come with 128GB of storage, a SD memory card slot, a full-size USB port and a micro HDMI connector. 3G will be built-in, but a cheaper Wifi-only model will be available. The 10in screen will have a resolution of 1,366x768 pixels which isn't as high as some other 10in tablets.

The Latitude 10 is a promising tablet, if only because it's a little different from all the other upcoming Windows 8 tablets. Much depends on pricing though and Dell, like all the other major Windows tablet manufacturers, has yet to confirm pricing.