So the new Dell Latitude 7280 is all about the business. No gaming here. So if you’re one who likes to spend their lunch playing your MOBAs, then leave now. I won’t be covering how well this can play games. It’s just not built that way.
Small laptops, or Ultrabooks as they were branded a few years ago need to be light, speedy and durable for those business people on the move. Thanks to Dell using an alloy for a chassis and an improved battery life, this is definitely one for you to look out for if you’re wanting to upgrade.
The top of the laptop is covered in a soft touch paint that feels very premium, and gives this ultrabook a tidy feeling. The underside is where the alloy comes into play, and makes the laptop durable for travelling and storing in a backpack or small laptop bag. Once inside, you’re greeted with a very solid keyboard that took no time to get used to typing. The trackpad, although small, is sensitive enough to send the mouse from one side of the screen to the other with one swipe.
Down the left hand side you will find the HDMI port, a USB 3.0 port, an optional smart-card reader and an optional Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C port. On the right you will find the laptop’s Ethernet port, headphone jack, SD memory reader and a port for mobile SIM cards so you can get mobile internet through data plans on the go.
The screen has a resolution of 1920×1080 and uses IPS technology. Not bad for a small laptop, and makes consuming media look absolutely great. Nice and sharp, and a lot of detail where it counts. But one place this laptop lets you down is colour reproduction. It’s just a little dull to me compared to other laptop screens. One thing I will say now is that it’s not for games. Yeah you could probably get away with playing a MOBA or browser Flash title, but nothing really more than that, and nothing that requires any kind of graphical performance.
Inside our review model was an i7-7600 processor, brand new to the market, as well as 8GB of RAM. There is a 16GB RAM version available but you’re looking at more money for that. One thing this laptop does have is an SSD at 256GB. There’s no hard drive in there, so if you’re going to be saving media, you would need to invest in some kind of external portable hard drive.
One aspect that you travelling business people would love is the extremely high battery life. We managed to get around 12 hours of use out of this ultrabook until we had to stick the charger back in which totally impressed me. It means that you can survive a day of use without having to bring a charger with you.
Now the biggest fear is the price. The model we received would set you back around £1400, and that’s not including some of the top tier customisable options that Dell offer such as more RAM, a better network card, some of the multimedia card readers that you can also install. So be aware of what you are putting in your laptop when buying.
But I’d still recommend it. Even though the price is high, it’s a solid little ultrabook that would suit anyone wanting extreme battery life and a decent product for work based processes like browsing, word documents and handling PDFs. You can find more information from the Dell website as well as their customisable options.
