Dell Latitude 7410 Chromebook Enterprise
The best of the corporate Chromebooks, but we suggest you call Dell and negotiate a better price
PRICE £919 (£1,102 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk
It’s clear where Dell is going with this machine. From the design to the specification, from the name to the price, it’s squarely aimed at the corporate market. It comes in clamshell and 2-in-1 variants with a range of specifications, running from a Core i3 model at just under £900 to a Core i7 at over £1,500, with three or four years of Dell ProSupport Plus on-site services bundled in.
The design is businesslike but still attractive, with a 14in display crammed into what’s effectively a 13.3in aluminium chassis just 18.5mm thick and 1.35kg in weight. The Latitude 7410 feels rock-solid – it’s been built to withstand 17 MILSTD 810G tests – and there’s barely a hint of give in the lid or body. And while the hinge on our clamshell model won’t allow any fancy convertible tricks, it does raise the keyboard slightly when the screen is tilted back, and even allows you to push the display back flat against the desk.
One thing that distinguishes this Chromebook is its connectivity. On the left are two USB-C 3.2 slots with Power Delivery, a microSD card slot and an HDMI 1.4 output, while two USB-A 3.2 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack sit on the right. One of the USB-A slots supports PowerShare for charging up your phone in transit. Needless to say, Dell offers a docking solution and monitors and mouse keyboard combos for office use, but the Latitude has all the connectivity you need to work anywhere within the unit itself.
We had some initial doubts about the keyboard and touchpad, not helped by the fact that the former on our test sample is an international keyboard with some symbols in some really odd places. The touchpad, meanwhile, was erratic, refusing to play ball one minute, sending the pointer jumping around the screen the next. Yet a Chrome update solved the touchpad issue, after which it was good as gold, while the keyboard impressed us more as time went on with its effective backlighting, firm typing action and nice, tactile feedback. British models with a UK keyboard should be fine.
The screen, meanwhile, is a marked improvement on the display of the Latitude’s main rival, the HP Pro C640. It’s brighter at 335cd/m2 and has better colour reproduction, covering 99.9% of sRGB with an average Delta E of 2.01. It’s unlikely that you’d do any design work on a corporate Chromebook, but your video meetings, productivity apps and after-hours Netflix binges are going to look great.
On the subject of vid video meetings, the Latitud Latitude has two other strengths. T The audio isn’t brilliant fo for entertainment purpo purposes – it lacks bass and tur turns shrill at higher volum volumes – but it’s very clear an and the built-in array microphone does a cracking job of capturing sound without the need for a separate mic. The built-in HD webcam is also very good in most lighting conditions, although it struggles with focus and exposure if there’s not enough light to work with.
As for performance, the combination of the faster Core i5-10310U and 16GB of DDR4 RAM on our test sample made it one of the two fastest Chromebooks this month, sometimes overpowering the hugely speedy HP with its Core i7 CPU. The Core i7 doesn’t actually give you any more cores or threads to play with, just a maximum clock speed bump from 4.4GHz to 4.9GHz, and only Linux applications are really going to push it that far. As a result, we’d rather have the Dell’s larger and faster 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD. The HP wins on battery life, with over 14 hours where the Dell can’t quite hit 12, but either way you’ve got a good working day covered.
The big issue with the Latitude is the same as with the HP Pro: it’s a great Chromebook, but check out that fearsome price tag. It’s something that larger enterprises more concerned with support and total cost of ownership will swallow, and, of all th the Ch Chromebooks b k on test, it’s the Dell that best fits their needs.
For smaller ler businesses or individuals, uals, however, there’s no tangible reason to spend nd this much. Both the Asus sus Chromebook Flip C436FA and the Lenovo ovo IdeaPad Flex 5 Chromebook romebook will have ve you covered for a lot ot less.
“The big issue with the Latitude is the same as with the HP Pro: it’s a great Chromebook, but check out that fearsome price tag”