Our View
Its one of the best laptops for content creators and students but not perfect to use as a hand held device because of its size.In Favour |
Against |
| Excellent 4k display | Average battery life |
| Powerful processor | Not comfortable to hold |
| Thunderbolt 3 with 4 lanes of PCIe support | Bad speaker location |
| USB-C charging and battery indicator | Webcam is a nose cam |
| Fingerprint scannerand Windows Hello | No USB-A and full sized SD slot |
| Great trackpad and keyboard | RAM is soldered |
| Best Pricing | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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$1,299+ | |
|
 |
$2,499 | |
This laptop is not designed to replace the original XPS 15. Its a supplementary device for the people that want something that's little more versatile that can use in different modes.
Design and Specifications
Its a thin and light 2 in 1 device that's using the new Kaby Lake G processor so those have the AMD GPUs with the Intel CPUs. Its a very powerful system in very small package.Speakers are located on the back which is not the best location. Speakers sound normal, I mean if there's a difference between the regular XPS 15 speakers and these it's not a substantial difference. They sound okay but the location is not great especially when you are in tablet mode, it does muffle the sound.
The ports on this device are all USB-C. There's four of them, two on each side and there's four lane PCIe support If you wanna attach external GPU to this thing. There's no USB-A and there's only a microSD slot which is not ideal because this is a device that's really great for content creators and those people would use an SD slot but you're stuck with microSD.
The charging is USB-C and we also have a battery indicator which we see on XPS products. Its a plus point.
The display is a 4k panel and it's an excellent display. It's very bright and color accurate. It goes up to 400 nits. The original XPS 15 screen was already good. Its even better. Its not as bright as MacBook pro's screen but I think its better then MackBook pro's screen. Its more color accurate.
There's also a dedicated pen for the 2 in 1 device which has low latency and its really useful for creatives and students. The nib feels good and reminds of a Microsoft Surface product. Its got a little bit texture to it when're writing on the glass.
The webcam is still located on the bottom which is an up nose angle. But because it's 2 in 1 so you can flip it into tent mode and then you have a normal looking image.
It also has a window's Hello for facial recognition and there's also a fingerprint sensor at the top of the keyboard.
Keyboard is a Maglev keyboard. It uses magnets to raise each key instead of a spring switch. Its actually one of the most interesting features. The purpose of this tech is to reduce the thickness of this laptop. When you first use it, its gonna be little bit different but you get use to it quickly.
The trackpad is great. Its your standard XPS trackpad. Its got a glass surface with great tracking and good button mechanics.
Hard drive(SSD) is removable but the RAM is soldered which isn't great. They've also gone with the killer WI-FI card again which is also not great.
The battery life is not what I expected. Its a 75 watt hours battery which is pretty big but the battery life is short. I'm not sure that this is a software issue or a driver thing or something that can be improved over time but right now it lasts for almost 5 hours at 250 nits which isn't enough for a 75 watt hours battery.
This laptop is running the I7-8705g.
So the GPU pushes out really similer performance to a GTX 1050, may be a little bit faster on some titles but most modern games can run your 60 frames per second if you lower the graphics quality a bit. Its good but not mind-blowing but keep in mind its thin and light 2 in 1 laptop.
The thermals are fair. If you're expecting some crazy performance you're gonna be disappointed. If you play heavy games for long enough, it can throttle.
The fans come on more often then normal. They're quiet under load but when you stress the system hard, it does get loud
Glitch
If you have three keys pressed down at the same time, you sometimes get other keys registering that you didn't pressed at all. Its infrequent and the reality is you're probably not spamming three keys at once together very often but it is a thing. I think its a software issue and hopefully Dell patch it soon.
Tablet mode issue
When you use this thing in tablet mode, its not exactly the most comfortable thing if you're gonna hand hold it. If you have just placed down and use it at rested tablet, its perfect but not if you're gonna hold this thing. Its a little big, its comfortable, its usable but it is big.Its a 15 inch screen which is never great for a hand held tablet device but you can use it in tent mode or presentation mode. You can pop it up to watch, you can play games you can connect up a controller or a mouse and a keyboard. Its really nice experience to be up and close to your screen while doing stuff.
| Display | 15.6" 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160) InfinityEdge Anti-Reflective Touch Display |
| Processor | Intel® Core™ i7-8705G Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.1 GHz, 4 cores) |
| RAM | 16GB DDR4-2400MHz integrated |
| Hard Drive | 256GB / 512GB / 1TB M.2 2280 PCIe Solid State Drive |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Radeon™ RX Vega M GL Graphics |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 4GB HMB2 Graphics Memory |
| Wireless | Killer 1435 802.11ac 2x2 WiFi and Bluetooth |
| Item Weight | 1.97kg |
| Product Dimensions | 14.06 x 9.25 x 0.45-0.66 inches |
| Battery | 6-Cell 75WHr Integrated Battery |
| Ports | 1x HDMI 2.0
2x USB-A 3.1 Gen1
1x USB-C with Thunderbolt 3
1x SD card reader
1x headphone/microphone jack |
| Price | $1,300+ |
Conclusion
I feel Dell put a lot of effort and time into making this thing. This is well engineered.I dont love the battery life. I hope it improves but aside from that this is a great device.
This is not for everyone. If you're looking for a traditional clamshell laptop, the XPS 15 is gonna be a better option but if you're creative, a student or someone that wants the portability of something that's really diverse and can do a lot of different things and you travel frequently and you watch movies while traveling, this is for you. Its better for a lot of things that XPS 15 can't do.
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