The sweet spot in Dell's current catalog of laptops has always been the excellent 14-inch Inspiron 1420 model, matched only by the snazzy XPS line -- the 13-inch M1330 and 15-inch M1530. Somewhere in there, Dell's basic Inspiron 15-inch -- long the bread and butter of the company's consumer laptops, got lost in the shuffle.

Now comes word from down under that Dell's Australian Web site is offering a successor to the current Inspiron 1520, in the form of the Inspiron 1525 (originality in naming has never been Dell's strong suit), which seems to be a slightly slimmer version of the 1520.

According to the Aussies, this model will ship (down there at least) on January 9, 2008, and so far pre-order configuration options are slim -- the only CPU right now is the Intel Core 2 Duo T7250, with X3100 graphics and all the usual Inspiron color combinations (Espresso Brown, Spring Green, etc.)

The 1525 starts at $1399 in Australian dollars, which is about $1,200 to you and me. We wouldn't be surprised to see an American release sometime soon, but for now, this is Australia-only.