 |
| DELL XPS 13 |
The Dell XPS 13 presented its virtues at the CES 2015 that was held in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year, and since we met it all its features seemed to achieve a perfect balance for users of Ultrabooks. Lightweight and compact, powerful and efficient, we are faced with what undoubtedly becomes the team to beat by the Windows-based equipment manufacturers.
Design: surprisingly compact
One looks at the Dell XPS 13 and a priori something does not fit. It does not look like a 13.3-inch Ultrabook. It's too small. At Dell they have been wrong, sure. This has to be an 11.6-inch laptop. But no: that diagonal is effectively 13.3 inches, but there is one fundamental responsible for that section: the screen with Sharp IGZO technology implemented by Dell, and have been baptized with an ambitious name: Infinity Display. The truth is that in some sense it does seem that the screen is infinite, but what makes the difference are the frames. Or rather, the almost absence of them.
Because the design of the Dell XPS 13 -and much of the user experience, as we will see later- is dictated by those very thin frames that allow us to have a computer that effectively integrates a 13.3-inch screen (fiu) but that It is encapsulated in a chassis that could pass perfectly through an 11.6-inch laptop. If one puts face to face a conventional 13.3-inch computer and a Dell XPS 13 with that same diagonal the difference in dimensions is obvious.
The Apple team has dimensions of 325 x 227 x 17 mm. The Dell one, 304.2 x 200.1 x 15.2 mm. Compare them with those of the MacBook Air of 11.6 inches (300 x 192 x 17 mm) and you will notice that it is closer to this last model than the one mentioned in the first place. These frames, by the way, require that the integrated webcam is located in the lower left corner of the screen, a position far from optimal and that makes in videoconferences the perspective from which we see is rather strange.
The almost suppression of frames allows the Dell XPS 13 to be almost the size of an 11-inch ultrabook despite its 13.3-inch screen
The difference is also seen somewhat in the weight, but not as much as in the dimensions. The Dell XPS 13 is a compact device, and when you take it for the first time it surprises that weight, which is greater than we would have thought in the first instance. The 1.18 kg of the 1080p model and the 1.26 kg of the QHD + model with touch screen offer that feeling that the Dell XPS 13 weighs more than it should. The reason is probably in the batteries: in the Dell XPS 13 we have a 52 Wh.
The construction of the Dell XPS 13 is excellent: the outer shell is made of aluminum, while inside we find a pleasant surprise: carbon fiber is the protagonist when deploying the screen. That allows the touch to rest the wrists on that surface is especially nice and much warmer than the MacBooks that are, of course, equipment "cold" for that extensive use of aluminum.
The profile of the equipment is wedge, but not as pronounced as that of other ultraportables: there is an appreciable thickness in the lower part, where the trackpad is located. On the sides (apart from a small speaker in each of them) we found the available ports: on the left, the power connector, the Mini DisplayPort, a USB 3.0 (with PowerShare, which means that if the laptop is turned off it can serve as an external charger for the mobile, for example) and the headphone socket; on the right an additional USB 3.0 port (also with PowerShare) and the SD card reader, in addition to a Noble lock, similar to the Kensington.
On the front there is a small LED that is activated when the laptop is fully charged and flashes yellow to warn us that we have very little battery left. One problem: if we are watching a movie in the dark with the charger connected, there is no way to disable that LED and that is somewhat annoying to fully enjoy the experience.
In general the finish of this ultrabook is of great quality, although it weighs more than one might think when looking at it
In the design of the lower part, that which is never seen, there are curious details, because apart from the ventilation grille that runs longitudinally that cover (like two thin longitudinal bumpers for a protected support) we have a small flip-top cover with the logo " XPS "that when displayed shows the traditional sticker with information related to the specific machine that we are handling (serial number and model, certifications, power supply characteristics, etc). The detail is curious and shows a vocation for good design. To some it will seem superfluous, but still it is an option that does not bother and effectively makes even seen from the bottom the design is more elegant.
Of keyboards and, above all, of touchpads
The keyboard has an excellent touch and also a good tour that makes the pressure necessary for the typing to be efficient without requiring a special effort. The only problem I have found is that the keys are noticeably smaller than in 13.3-inch computers, which makes it difficult to get used to and one commits more mistakes than necessary. Like everything, the practice makes perfect, but it is something that stands out and that is in a certain logical way given the small dimensions of the team.
Maybe Dell could have taken more advantage of the surface available for the keyboard - the power button would have to go elsewhere, yes, but otherwise we found the keyboard very well resolved even on the cursor keys. Pity too that Enter key that looks somewhat "compressed" by the rest of the keyboard map -by the way, in our case we received a model with English keyboard-. The function keys are combined with the control options for multimedia playback, the backlighting of the keyboard (3 positions), or the volume of the speakers, for example, and in general the distribution is correct.
Great keyboard and a touchpad that will give the maximum with Windows 10 in the market
Special mention deserves the touchpad, one of the most relevant components when it comes to taking advantage of the laptop and traditionally the element that has never been comparable to the one that integrated the portable computers of Apple. The first impressions were worrisome: the touchpad behaved erratically and caused that for example when leaving the pointer in a place drop your finger that pointer "skip" a few pixels. Things like vertical scrolling with two fingers in browsers - Chrome goes surprisingly wrong in this section, while in Explorer everything goes smoothly - they made that experience suffer, something that also complained about the team's users in the forums of Dell support.
As in the case of ventilation, Dell ended up acting and recently published an update of the firmware of this Ultrabook that corrected some of those conflicts, but that still did not offer an experience comparable to that of the MacBook in all situations. The explanation is simple: The Dell XPS 13 integrates one of the new Precission Touchpad approved by Microsoft and is fully governed by the operating system.
This makes it impossible to apply improvements to the touchpad with the help of drivers or external drivers, and in fact the usual advanced panels of Synaptics that allowed to control a lot of parameters of these touch panels are not enabled in the case of the Dell XPS 13 One will have to deal with a spartan menu of options in the configuration of the PC of Windows 8.1 in which the available options are very, very limited and that, those yes, allows us to verify that in fact we have a "precision touch panel". "
As you know Windows 10 will introduce a series of interesting improvements precisely in this section. The idea is just that: that all manufacturers unify design and behavior of the new touchpads so that we do not find that in each manufacturer this component is his father and his mother. The "inventions" of companies such as HP or Dell itself to differentiate themselves in this section will be annulled, and that will allow to provide a common experience, something that in my opinion is an absolute success. The problem is that this will take some time, as can be seen in that control panel especially poor and in an operation that still has room for improvement. But a door opens to hope: we installed a Windows 10 TP on the computer -more details later- and after configuring that option on the panel of this operating system the behavior of the touchpad did improve significantly.
Comments
Post a Comment