Dell XPS 15 2-in-1
Do it all, anywhere
Nobody wants to see the words ‘Starting at £1,699’. We’d accept ‘Going up to £1,699’99’ or ideally ‘Buy two for £1,699’.699’. Still, with a top-end laptop you’re getting a PC and a monitor in one, and it’s not surprising that this add up to a fair bit of cash. Dell’s redesigned full-size convertible works hard too justify it.it.
We’re sceptical about ‘2 iin 1’ or ‘360-degree’ laptops, which have a hinge that goes all the way round, so you can fold the screen back and use it like a tablet. The risk is that the machine is too big and heavy to do that comfortably. But at 2kg, or 4lb 6½oz in old money, this laptop-tablet is as light as 15in laptops get, and the refined Infinity Edge design leaves almost no border around the LCD panel, making it surprisingly compact.
The wedge-shaped case, in Dell’s usual combination of silver aluminium and black carbon fibre, still looks kind of silly folded back, but it’s practical: even if you don’t try to pick it up like an ipad, you can sit it on the kitchen counter to follow a recipe without the keyboard sticking out and gathering flour. Used the regular way, the hinge feels solid and you can ignore the touchscreen and use the excellent glass-topped touchpad.
Very slim laptops need very slim keyboards, which has got Apple into trouble with its accident-prone ‘butterfly’ switches. Dell has a different solution: a little magnet under each flat key fakes the tangible click you’d expect from a traditional keyboard. It really works, and our typing speed showed the benefit. The screen is bog-standard Full HD; 4K models start at £2,199. Our colour meter found a creditable 90 per cent of the SRGB spectrum, with lots of contrast and good accuracy for all but the most professionally picky photo and video editors. Besides multi-touch, it supports Dell’s Active Pen stylus (£62 from www. snipca.com/28281) if you fancy drawing or handwriting.
There’s no skimping inside: the new Intel i5-8305g processor, fed by 8GB of memory and helped along by a fast NVME SSD, comes packaged with a dedicated 4GB AMD Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics ca card. The results in our tests were well into desktop-pc territory. Even without looking at faster options, this base model is a pleasure to use for work and play – and battery life, at 8½ hours in our video-playback test, is the icing on the cake.
SPECIFICATIONS
2.8GHZ 2.8 Intel Core i5-8305g quad-core processor withwit 4GB Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics • 8GB memory • 256GB SSD • 15.6in 1920x1080-pixel screen • Webcam • 802.11ac Wi-fi • 2x Thunderbolt 3/USBU Type-c ports • 2x USB 3.1 Type C/ Displayports • microsd card reader • Windows 10 Home • 16x354x235mm (HXWXD) • 2kg • One-year warranty www.snipca.com/28280
VERDICT: It’s not perfect, nor is it cheap, but this is a superbly practical machine. Watch out for HP, though… ★★★★★
ALTERNATIVE: HP Spectre x360 15 £1,599 We haven’t yet tested this, but with an i7 processor, twice the SSD andd a 4K screen, it looks a strong rival
This light laptop-tablet is fast and a pleasure for work and play