Ultraportables have been an office favorite for a while and during our testing we found Dell’s XPS 13 offers the current best balance between price, performance and design.
Windows 8 and 10 benefited from touchscreen usage, and when they were first released, Microsoft’s Surface, Surface Pro and Lenovo’s Yoga offered tablet and touchscreen capabilities which made them more usable than early ultraportable models.
But new devices like Dell’s XPS 13 have raised the bar with beautiful displays, good battery life, increased functionality and proper, backlit keyboards, that are making the new range of ultraportables a workplace favorite.
The overall feel of the XPS 13 with the metallic finishing gives an understated elegance to the device; unlike the new rose-gold finish of the new Apple Macbook that screams out for attention. This is very much less ostentatious.
The keyboard was easy to use and the trackpad large and easy to reach. The inclusion of the full-sized keyboard was nice but the shallowness of the design means that each key travels less and that takes some getting used to.
Available ports are predictably limited, but comprehensive enough. The more notable include a 3.5mm headset jack, Thunderbolt port USB 3.0 port and a series of five little white LEDs that will give you the battery's current charge at the press of a button. The inclusion of a handy SD card reader was a welcome surprise.
The screen itself is more than enough for a work device. The barely there bezel makes the display feel almost seamless and more than a match for 4K machines. Graphics performance was never going to compare to a gaming laptop given the use of integrated graphics card but it was enough for us to enjoy a few games of Football Manager.
Our main complaint was the location of the webcam on the bottom of the screen. It provided some disgusting moments when video calling when the other party had a clear view up our nostrils and efficient usage required some acrobatics and phonebooks set up under the XPS 13.
We were able to watch our test movie almost five times in a row giving us a battery life of a bit more than nine hours at default levels of brightness and sound. Sound quality was more than decent with us able to hear clearly with the volume cranked up half way. At full volume, there was no distortion or pops.
One thing we didn’t like was the Dell pre-installed bloatware. As with other vendors, Dell has pre-installed antivirus and other programs that they hope we’ll use. But we’d much rather they give us a purely vanilla machine with only Windows 10 on it so we could decide what we’d like to install for ourselves.
Using the XPS 13 for a month after the death of our 2014 MacBook Air, we found that it is a worthy work tool. At S$2,299, the power contained within its small frame is more than enough for any work situation you may need from it. A little extra oomph is enough to make it a perfect device for any road warrior.