Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1
IS THIS PREMIUM 2-IN-1 BETTER FOR BUSINESS, OR IS IT A LATERAL MOVE FROM DELL?
DELL HAS MAINTAINED a strong command in the business ultrabook space over the last few years with its XPS range, and despite the fact that you can get both the 13 and 15-inch XPS models in a 2-in-1 configuration – or choose from an entire range of Inspiron 2-in-1 laptops – Dell also has a New Latitude 7400 2-in-1 for you to take home. Technically the Latitude family are pitched at commercial customers since they come with a Windows 10 Pro OS and additional security features like a fingerprint scanner and an infra-red camera, but there’s no reason you couldn’t pick one up as a consumer.
The main benefit of the Latitude range is a more generous battery that’ll keep you working longer. The base model (the one tested here) comes with a 42Wh battery that’ll get seven hours and 18minutes under heavy workloads and pushes 14 hours and 17 minutes for 1080p movie playback. Dell is planning on releasing an even bigger 60Wh Long-life Polymer battery for the clamshell Latitude 7400 in July and it showed off a 72Wh model with a reported 26h battery life at CES.
For the most part the device has a pretty standard configuration utilising an Intel Core i5-8265U or i7-8665U, 8GB of RAM and either a 256GB or 512GB NVMe SSD. This is paired with a 14-inch FullHD touchscreen that fully folds back on itself to transform into a convertible tablet. While the main interface connections are two Thunderbolt ports, the device also includes a number of other useful options, including: HDMI plus two USB 3 (Type-A), ports, an SD card reader and a 3.5mm headphone jack, for a nicely rounded set of interface options. The keyboard has a decent travel distance for a convertible but the membrane keys feel a little mushy and the trackpad is small and overly sticky when scrolling.
In general home and office task benchmarks the core i5 Latitude 7400 2-in-1 was less than 8% behind a Dell Inspiron 13 7000 that we tested last year. This was impressive considering the Inspiron 13 had a Core i7-8550U CPU and double the RAM allocation of the Latitude 7400. These scores were a bit closer to what we were predicting on Cinebench’s multi-threaded CPU benchmark and HWBot’s 1080p media encoding test where the Latitude came in 17.3% and 31% behind respectively. Both these laptops use integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics, so for any GPU benchmarks the two were functionally identical on any graphically intensive applications.
It might seem unfair to compare the i5 Latitude to an i7 Inspiron, but if you consider the i7 Inspiron is $1,120 less than the i5 Latitude and that you can get it on sale for almost $2,000 less, that disparity seems less valid. Sure, the Inspiron only has a 28Wh battery and doesn’t include the enterprise features, but these features don’t fully account for that price difference.