Opening the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook up, this shiny metal trim is beautifully contrasted with the black interior. The display sports a glossy black screen that runs all the way to the screen's edge, giving it the impression of having no bezel. Meanwhile the keyboard surround has a lovely matt, soft-touch finish. Similar to the finish used on HP’s premium Envy line, like the HP Envy Beats Edition 14, it’s very comfortable for your hands to rest on during typing and doesn’t really show up grease marks.
The XPS 13 has a fantastic minimalist look, with a metal lid, smooth curves and a carbon-fibre main body. Despite having a 13in display the laptop is surprisingly compact, even for an ultrabook; by reducing the depth of the main chassis, Dell has managed to make the Dell XPS L322X battery look much smaller than its competitors, but it appears to have pulled it off without sacrificing rigidity.
And that's one of the bigger challenges for Dell -- to straddle the consumer and corporate markets with a single design. For those who haven't noticed, Dell is becoming more of a corporate enterprise-centric company and less of a consumer outfit. So, designs like the XPS 13 that appeal to both sets of customers are an imperative.
The Dell XPS 13’s keyboard is almost exactly similar to the Dell Adamo XPS 13, which had a very good keyboard. Likewise, the Dell XPS 13 features wide chiclet-styled backlit keys that are very well laid out and just a treat to type on. All the alphanumeric keys and frequently used keys like Space, Enter, Shift, Alt, etc, are accurately placed. Overall, we’re very impressed with the Dell XPS 13’s keyboard, it’s as great as any Lenovo ThinkPad laptop launched last year.
When you first put your hands on Dell's XPS 13, there is a surprisingly nice feeling to the overall ultrabook. Company hasn't gone for any lightweight or thinnest milestones thus giving it ample amount of space to build decent good looking and fairly sturdy device. Unlike Toshiba's Portege Z830, which we reviewed last week, XPS 13 feels comfortable in hand thanks to the rubberised deck and the carbon fibre weave on the base of the laptop.
In all honesty, though perhaps it sounds a little contradictory to our opening sentiments above, if you're looking to save a few pesos, the lower-end $999 SKU, with its 128GB SSD and Core i5-2467M dual core, is probably powerful enough and responsive enough for just about anything you could reasonably expect to do with an ultrabook. With 4GB of RAM and an SSD, Windows 7 is going to feel energetic and spry. You'll just have to keep your data collection in check and level-set your expectations in gaming. Beyond that, did you notice the real kicker? Right. Wake the kids--the Dell Studio 1440 battery has a backlit keyboard. Hello? Why can't every manufacturer make this standard? And tone down, typing ninjas; we realize actually seeing the keyboard shouldn't be a requirement for true geeks. That said, on an occasionally cramped ultralight keyboard, in front of the TV with only mood lighting going on, it comes in rather handy. No pun intended.
4 GB of RAM is standard for today's Ultrabooks, and like other manufacturers it comes in the form of unchangeable DDR3-1333 RAM. A particular highlight of the XPS 13 is also the 256 GB SSD, whose excellent performance - so much is already let on at this point - we will to look at closer later on.
The Dell XPS 13 has an aluminum lid, a black painted magnesium alloy keyboard deck and a very cool looking and feeling carbon fiber bottom. Build quality, fit and finish and even the box are top notch. It makes a mockery of the HP Folio 13 sitting beside it on our desk; an Ultabook that costs just $50 less than the Dell but uses everyday design elements and plastics and ships in your typical HP cardboard outer box with foam retainers. Of course, looks aren't everything and the box is exciting for the first 10 minutes, but material quality and durability are rather important, so Dell competes nicely with the Dell XPS L322X AC adapter and the 13" MacBook Air, its two aluminum-clad chic competitors.
With so much of the attention in mobile focused on tablets, it's easy to dismiss laptops. Yet they remain in the computing mainstream and are still the preferred choice for mobile professionals who create stuff with physical keyboards. Ultrabooks are the slim, light, quick-to-start-up-and-resume — and not especially cheap — machines that Intel has been evangelizing. These computers are supposed to deliver all-workday batteries, too, at least under the less-rugged conditions in which I ran my tests. Under those conditions, neither came close.
The LCD panel behind the glass is top-notch though. It might be only a 1366x720 panel but the colours are spot on and there's plenty of detail. We really enjoyed looking at it and movies and TV shows look superb with that high contrast - thanks in part to that glass cover.
Another major difference in design comes with the black rubbery palm rest and trackpad. I really preferred the feel of the surface to the metal on other laptops, but the trackpad itself is where the XPS begins to suffer from some usability issues. Dell has integrated the mouse buttons into the trackpad, the way Apple and several Windows laptop makers have. But the navigating experience is not as smooth as it is on Apple's laptop and can be fustrating. For example, using two fingers to scroll is jumpy, and while pointing and clicking works decently, I noticed the cursor mistakenly jumping or getting stuck at times.
One look at the XPS 13 and it's easy to see that Dell took its design inspiration from Apple. However, the aluminum laptop is one of the best-made laptops on the market, and that's not something I've said about a Dell laptop in a long time. It's got a 13-inch display, but Dell has crammed the wide display in a case that's closer in size to a 12-inch laptop by using a smaller frame around the display. It's very thin and light and the chiclet-style keyboard, which has gaps between the keys, is very comfortable. The rubberish palm rest is also comfortable.
As far as raw muscle is concerned, it's about the same as almost any other Core i5 ultrabook, as you can see in the chart above. It's certainly no less capable, though: adding a 1920 x 1200 external monitor, I went through a standard full day of work with over 30 browser tabs, a couple of push email accounts, TweetDeck, iTunes music and even some 1080p video clips without noticing any major slowdown. Thanks to the particularly speedy Samsung PM830 solid state drive, those tabs and apps loaded quickly, too, and boot times and resume times were among the quickest we've seen: only 17 seconds and a lightning-fast 1.8 seconds respectively. Just don't expect to play any graphically intensive games. The XPS 13 managed just 11.1 frames per second in our Just Cause 2 benchmark using the integrated Intel graphics.
The design and build quality are a cut above anything we've seen from Dell in a long time, and among the best we've seen in any thin-and-light laptop on the market. The base, composed of carbon fiber, has a pleasant soft-touch feel, and it hides the obnoxious service tag info under a flip-up metal plate for a cleaner look. The matte-black magnesium-alloy keyboard deck and the aluminum lid add rigidity where it's needed. The whole machine weighs 3 pounds--nearly the same as Apple's 13-inch Macbook Air. Dell's system, despite having a 13.3-inch screen, is actually shorter and narrower than Apple's, thanks to the extremely narrow bezel around the edge. Dell likes to say that it put a 13-inch screen into an 11-inch chassis, which is a bit of a stretch, but the laptop's compactness is impressive. The Dell XPS L322X adapter felt solid and dense in my hands, and it didn't flex at all.
The full-size chiclet-style keyboard is quiet with soft, well-cushioned feedback and a simple layout; the individual keys and keyboard are matte black. This finish prevents the fingerprint smudges common to laptops with glossy keyboards but you can still get some smudges from the natural oils in your skin. The keyboard support structure is good; there is little flex but when a notebook is this thin, there isn't really anywhere for the keyboard to flex. Individual key travel is good but some of our editors thought the keyboard action was a bit "mushy" compared to something like a desktop keyboard with mechanical keys.
At $999 for a 128GB SSD and Intel Core i5-2467M CPU, the XPS 13 is reasonably priced, although HP, Toshiba, and others offer similar specs for $100 or so less. Working in Dell's favor are the system's excellent build quality--the body is a mix of aluminum, magnesium alloy, and carbon fiber--and its smaller footprint. It's not quite a 13-inch laptop in an 11-inch body, but it's in the ballpark.
The first thing that strikes you about the XPS 13 is how compact it is. Despite it being a 13-inch display, the 31.6 x 20.5 cm footprint is narrow and Dell makes no secret of its desire to be smaller than the 13-inch MacBook Air but with a similar screen size.
The packaging was pretty good. The XPS 13 came in a laptop briefcase-esque carton, with lots of foam padding which offers shock protection. With the foam padding, the box gives you an impression that the Ultrabook is a lot bigger than it actually is.
The little touches are nice, including a handsome keyboard backlight, a soft-touch palmrest and underside, and surprisingly beefy speakers. Touch-typing on the island keys was easier than usual thanks to a slight depression built into the top of each key. Overall, it’s a very attractive ultrabook that can almost go toe to toe with Apple in the design department.
Our XPS 13 and its six-cell, non-removable battery soldiered through our standard Dell Studio 1440 battery rundown test of videos looping endlessly for a respectable four hours and 58 minutes before succumbing to exhaustion. That's a half-hour longer than the last XPS we reviewed could manage, the XPS 15z, and a full two hours more than 2010's XPS 14. But, looking at a more direct competitor, it lags about an hour behind what HP's Folio 13 managed on the same test.
Overall, I find it to be very good, but I have also experienced accidental clicks when my right hands was going for one of the keys around the “H” key. This never happened to me with other laptops, so the sensitivity of the trackpad may need some tweaking.
The good: The Dell XPS 13 fits a glass-covered 13-inch screen into a smaller-than-expected body. The sophisticated design is eye-catching and sturdy, without driving up the price.
The bad: The limited port selection doesn't include HDMI or an SD card slot; the display should be better; and Dell XPS L322X battery life falls behind other slim laptops'.
The bottom line: Dell packs a 13-inch display into a very small footprint in the XPS 13 ultrabook, making it one of the few slim laptops that actually top the MacBook Air in some areas.
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