Dell XPS 13 review

You don't have to be a marketing skeptic to agree that "Ultrabook" is a somewhat hyperbolic term for a class of devices designed a little thinner, a little lighter and maybe a little quicker than those notebooks that have come before. From a pure hardware standpoint there's nothing particularly "ultra" about them when compared to a standard Wintel lappytop, but manufacturers are, thankfully, using this as an opportunity to raise their game on another front that's becoming increasingly
important in the world of portable computing: aesthetics.

Compared to clunky laptops of yore, many Ultrabooks mark a truly massive step forward when it comes to purity of design and Dell is showing some impressive chops with the new XPS 13. But, when you're buckled in to coach class and it's time to get to work, looks are less important than having a solid laptop that performs. Does the new XPS have the brawn to match its beauty? Let's find out.

ight out of the box it's clear Dell is trying to make a statement with the new XPS 13. Simple, dark, minimalist packaging contains the sliver of the laptop itself -- and an unfortunately clunky power brick. The 45-watt adapter is smaller than many others Dell makes, but it's outfitted with a fat, three-pronged power cable that makes the thing take up a huge amount of space in your bag. If PC makers are going to get really serious about going after Apple with slinky laptops, they're going to have to come up with some slinkier power adapters to match.

Ignoring that bit of standard-issue fare, the XPS 13 makes a great first impression. If you've been following along, you'll notice it dispenses with many of the gaudy embellishments that made the XPS 14z and 15z so polarizing, with only the fingerprint-free metal lid and pillowy keyboard tying it all together. Its lid is of satiny aluminum with a sandblasted sort of appearance, embossed in the middle with a glossy, 1.5-inch Dell logo. The bottom, though, is even more alluring. Protected beneath a thin rubberized coating is a carbon fiber construction that feels fantastic. You don't have to be a motorsports nut to appreciate the look of a fine carbon weave, and with the soft-touch coating it creates a surface that's reassuringly easy to hold onto when you're wandering around the office trying to find your next meeting.

That grippability is further aided by a pair of rubber feet that run the width of the bottom of the unit, one on the front and the back. These also do a fine job of keeping the laptop in place when typing furiously in said meeting, elevating the thing slightly so that the ridge of air vents on the bottom can do their thing. And they seem to do their thing well. We never noticed an excessively warm lap thanks to our Core i5-equipped unit.

Inset amid that lovely weave is another bit of brushed aluminum, a metal plate with "XPS" menacingly present. (We think this logo would make for far more interesting lid decor than that somewhat overly friendly Dell circle with its quirky E.) Flip this flap open and hidden below is the ugly Windows product key sticker along with about a million certification logos (FCC, etc.). That Dell took the time to design this metal cover just to hide all these unsightly logos and stickers says a lot about the attention to detail here.

Try to open the laptop, though, and you'll realize some further attention was needed elsewhere. There's a somewhat stiff hinge, which isn't necessarily a problem (you certainly don't have to worry about it separating on its own), but actually getting it open can be a bit of a challenge. Stick a finger under the lip of the lid and, when you start to lift, the laptop will start to flip over before opening. And that's not because it's a particularly light little thing. In fact, at just under three pounds, it's actually fractionally heavier than the physically larger 13-inch MacBook Air.

Get it open and you're presented with a backlit, island-style keyboard, black semi-gloss keys raised over a matte background and situated above a similarly dark touchpad, power button to the upper-left.

At 2.99 pounds (1.36kg), the XPS 13 in good company among the 2.96-pound MacBook Air and the 2.9-pound ASUS Zenbook UX31, though none of these are quite as impossibly light as the Toshiba Portege Z830, which weighs a mere 2.47 pounds. Certainly, Dell's entry bests the HP Folio 13 (3.3 pounds), along with the 13-inch Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook (3.5 pounds) and the untold number of 14-inchers we'll see this year.

Available ports are predictably limited, but comprehensive enough. On the left are a 3.5mm headset jack, USB 2.0 port and the power input. On the right is a USB 3.0 port and a Mini DisplayPort, plus a series of five little white LEDs that will give you the battery's current charge at the press of a button. And that's it. Dell went the way of Lenovo and sadly opted not to include an SD card reader, which we would

his is, again, a 13-inch laptop. While there are multiple choices for processor and disk size there's but one display on offer, a 1366 x 768 unit that manages to do greater than 720p, but not by much. It is a 16:9 aspect ratio display, so the panel itself is slightly shorter and wider than that on the 13-inch MacBook Air, despite the XPS 13 itself being slightly narrower.

Yes indeed we have some skinny bezels here, but sadly we're also talking about a screen that has a lower pixel density than the 1600 x 900 panel on the $1,100 UX31. (The Air has a 1440 x 900 display, but you'll pay $1,299 and up for the privilege.) It's not a massive difference, but individual pixels are far more noticeable on the Dell.

The contrast of the display doesn't exactly impress either. Get perfectly on-center and it's adequate, but stray more than a few degrees to either side and it quickly begins to fade. This is a particular problem when you're looking down from above, as you're likely to be when sitting upright with this guy on your lap. The hinge doesn't let you lay the screen flat enough and you're often be stuck with a decidedly pasty image.

The speakers are good enough that you can leave your Jambox at home.
We were, however, quite impressed by the integrated speakers -- surprisingly so. Even at moderate levels the laptop easily filled a hotel room with adequate sound and, when cranked, managed to become uncomfortably loud. This will not beat the quality of even mid-range cans or earbuds, but it's certainly good enough that you can leave your Jambox at home.
Our base-spec XPS 13 contains a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M processor with 4GB of RAM and we found it to be more than adequate for general computing tasks, including writing this very review. It was quite snappy and responsive navigating through Windows, playing videos, listening to music and, in general, computing.

A cold boot is completed in a very respectable 15 seconds and the system wakes from a sleep almost instantly. A 3DMark score of 4,130 puts this in the higher end compared with other Ultrabooks, though slightly behind the UX31. We were unable to get Vantage to execute successfully