It’s called rebranding, and by golly, Dell must do it. Once the world’s top PC maker, it’s ceded market share to the likes of HP and Acer and earned a name for bland designs and subpar customer support. So, we will be able to see where the outfit would wish to offer its laptops a makeover as some way of distancing itself from its tarnished rap.
That’s precisely what appears to be happening with the Inspiron 14z, a 14-incher with a slimmed-down aluminum body, available in an incredibly staid color palette (sorry, guys, bubblegum pink isn’t an option this time around). With a low starting price of $600, it’s ideal for college students and almost anyone trying to find an even-enough laptop for the house. Nevertheless, so are loads of affordable 14- and 15-inch laptops. Is that this one extraordinary enough to make your short list? Let’s examine.
Feel and look
For a redesigned laptop, the 14z initially looks a lot like any other Dell notebooks we have seen in seasons past. ‘Round back, it has the type of recessed hinge that’s made Dell’s notebooks unmistakable over the last several years. Which is to assert, there’s a couple of half inch of deck space behind the hinge, which suggests the display sits less than perhaps you’re used to. It’s mostly a bold design choice (one we approve of mightily), though that sunken hinge also makes for some balanced weight distribution for those who set the pc for your lap.
With the lid closed, the 14z looks refreshingly simple. Call us suckers for finely brushed aluminum, however the company also chose a reasonably foolproof pair of color options: as well as the luxurious “fire red” found on our unit, you may get it in black for $30 less. Yes, Dell could have whittled its color options, but it surely hasn’t ceased its practice of charging extra for colored lids. Old habits die hard, we suppose.
Still, it’s obvious Dell needed to cut some corners to hit that $600 price point. Despite a pared-down metal lid, the 14z still manages to feel cheap. Although the lid has a matte finish and is not made up of glossy plastic, it still picks up fingerprints — stubborn little smudges than is known as a beast to take away. Under the lid, that aluminum material extends around the palm rest and above the keyboard, but for whatever reason the realm in between the keys is black. That color-blocking makes for a mismatched effect, with the keyboard looking chintzy against the sleek metal deck. As well, the underside side of the laptop is made from plastic and has an ungainly bulge where the six-cell battery is. We’d be exaggerating if we said this was our least favorite design within the history of laptops, but we are not sure Dell’s exactly turned over a brand new leaf either.
The excellent news is that the 14z comes well stocked with ports. The bad news: a lot of them are hidden beneath flimsy doors. Starting with the left side, you will see that door number 1, housing DisplayPort, HDMI and USB 2.0 sockets, with a vent and an SD / MMC / MS card reader nearby. Front edge doesn’t contain anything, though lift the laptop slightly and you may see stereo speakers, along side four LED lights that glow white to check the backlit keyboard and tool button. Tucked into the bezel is a 1.0 megapixel webcam. Moving along to the correct side, there is a tray-loading optical drive and door number two, behind which you will find two USB 3.0 ports and a combined headphone / mic port. Lastly, the back edge is home to the AC port and an Ethernet jack, the latter of that is also covered.
Keyboard and trackpad
To its credit, we typed most of this 3,000-word review at the 14z’s chiclet keyboard, and got by with relatively few spelling mistakes. As with its higher-end sibling, the XPS 14z , the keys are cushy with a lot of travel. But these — these are much noisier. We grew irritated with the high-pitched clack, and we got the sense it was a distraction for some people unfortunate enough to be working about a feet away. That said, they’re at the least backed by a strong panel; we didn’t notice a touch of flex as we banged out emails and web searches. Also, the Inspiron 14z’s keyboard wins points for being backlit, although you will have to pay one other $25 for that luxury.
And the trackpad? Not our favourite, but hardly the foremost maddening either. As a pared-down navigation device, it’s perfectly adequate: it offers a low-friction surface that makes dragging the cursor around the screen painless. When you start attempting multitouch gestures, though, its cramped quarters become a con. It is a shame, because if not for the indisputable fact that your fingers bump against the sides, the trackpad actually pulls off pinch to zoom quite well. Two-fingered scrolling is exasperating differently: it’s essential hold two fingers at the pad and look forward to a scroll symbol to seem onscreen before you begin. Even then, we the customarily felt like we had no control of where we ended up at the page.
The object concerning the touchpad is that to boot-behaved because it is for everyday scrolling, it’s coupled with two tiny, rather stiff buttons. Pressing the button required lots more thumb pressure than we needed, and throughout our testing we had moments where we found ourselves keenly acutely aware of the hassle we were setting up. Using touch buttons has to be an unconscious experience. Fortunately, that’s something you will get if in case you have the money (and aesthetic sensibility) to step as much as the XPS 14z.
Display and sound
0 Like almost every system offered at this price, the Inspiron 14z’s resolution is fixed at 1366 x 768. The screen’s adequate enough for staring at documents and flicks head-on, and it is also bright enough so that you can be capable to work comfortably in a well-lit, fluorescent room. Yours truly also streamed a great half dozen episodes of Breaking Bad, and the picture quality was suitably crisp even at full screen.
The difficulty is, there is not much flexibility within the viewing angles. We needed to adjust the screen angle very carefully before leaning back at the couch to observe Walter White lie and growl his way through season two. If the lid happened to be dipped too far back or if we watched from the side while a chum took the prime seat, the image invariably looked darker.
As for sound, the 14z isn’t notably terrible, however the audio is predictably tinny. We’d say any of HP’s Beats-enabled laptops has the advantage here.
Performance and graphics
Our $730 unit came loaded with a 2.3GHz Core i5-2410M CPU, Intel integrated graphics, 6GB of RAM and a 640GB 5,400RPM hard disk. Armed with those components, it landed a PCMark Vantage score of 6,177, that is higher than what we have seen from other systems with similar specs. As an example, it bested the pricier Sony VAIO SB , which has an identical processor, at the side of 4GB of RAM and a 5,400 RPM harddisk. The SB has two graphics cards — one in all that’s an identical Intel HD 3000 — but even if we enabled its discrete AMD Radeon HD 6470M with 512MB of video memory, its PCMark score still didn’t come near to what we got at the Inspiron 14z. As for graphics, its 3DMark06 score is based on — it not slightly higher than — what we have seen from other systems with a similar Intel HD 3000 card.
|
PCMark Vantage |
3DMark06 |
Battery Life |
|
| Dell Inspiron 14z (2.3 Core i5-2410M, Intel HD Graphics 3000) | 6,177 | 4,079 | 6:37 |
| Dell XPS 14z (2.8GHz Core i7-2640M, Intel HD Graphics 3000 / NVIDIA GeForce GT520M 1GB) | 7,982 | 5,414 | 4:54 |
| ASUS Zenbook UX31 (1.7GHz Core i5-2557M, Intel HD Graphics 3000) | 10,508 | 4,209 | 5:41 |
| Acer Aspire Ultrabook S3 (1.6GHz Core i5-2467M, Intel HD Graphics 3000) | 5,367 | 3,221 | 4:11 |
| 13-inch, 2011 MacBook Air (1.7GHz Core i5-2557M, Intel HD Graphics 3000) | 9,484 | 4,223 | 5:32 (Mac OS X) / 4:12 (Windows) |
| Samsung Series 9 (1.7GHz Core i5-2537M, Intel HD Graphics 3000) | 7,582 | 2,240 | 4:20 |
| HP Envy 14 (2.3Core i5-2410M, Intel HD Graphics 3000 / AMD Radeon HD 6630M 1GB) | 6,735 | 7,214 | 3:55 |
| Sony VAIO SB (2.3 Core i5-2410M, Intel HD Graphics 3000 / AMD Radeon HD 6470M 512MB) | 5,129 (stamina mode) / 5,636 (speed mode) | 3,609 (stamina) / 5,128 (speed) |
3:39 (speed) / 5:11 (stamina) Extended battery: 9:49 (speed) / 12:21 (stamina) |
| Lenovo ThinkPad X1 (2.5GHz Core i5-2410M, Intel HD Graphics 3000) | 7,787 | 3,726 | 3:31 / 6:57 (slice battery) |
| Notes: the better the score the easier. For 3DMark06, the 1st number reflects score with GPU off, the second one with it on. | |||
As for real-world usage, the 14z had no problem maintaining as we juggled a number of browser tabs, downloaded and installed apps and spent hours watching movies off Netflix at full screen. Throughout, it didn’t exactly stay cool, however it didn’t get leg-scorching either, not even during those marathon streaming sessions. But as with its XPS brethren, the disadvantage to such a superb heat management system is one noisy fan. Even if we opened a brand new tab in Chrome to ascertain Twitter, the whirring kicked up a notch. As we said with the XPS 14z, it isn’t something you’ll hear in case you are at the couch, working with the television within the background, however it might just grab your attention in case you are toiling away in a quiet room.
Battery life
As unsightly as that bulging battery is, it gets the job done.
As unsightly as that bulging battery is at the underside of the laptop, it gets the job done. The 14z’s six-cell lasted an imposing six hours and thirty seven minutes in our standard battery rundown test, which involves looping an analogous movie off the hard disk, with WiFi enabled and the display brightness fixed at 65 percent. Had we just been checking email and web surfing, we bet lets have squeezed out even in additional runtime. Even in our taxing video playback test, though, it lasted markedly longer than other laptops with a similar processor and graphics card. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1, as an instance, managed just three hours and thirty-one minutes. (At its best, the X1 can last seven hours, but with the aid of a $170 slice battery.) Meanwhile, a Sony VAIO SB series laptop with an identical processor and integrated Intel graphics lasted a shorter five hours and 11 minutes, inspite of the graphics fixed in a so-called stamina mode that disables the discrete card.
Software
1 Dell already had a nasty rap for saddling its PCs with bloatware, and if it desired to check out the logo in yet another light, it definitely didn’t do itself any favors with the 14z. To be clear, the difficulty isn’t what Dell pre-loaded; it’s how invasive these apps become the second one you boot into Windows. Immediately upon startup, you will see pop-ups reminding you to back up your data using Dell DataSafe, activate McAfee, update your security settings and accept Nero’s end user license agreement. Well good morning to you too, Dell!
The corporate also preloads its Stage software for straightforward access to photos, music and other media, which means that you’ve a massive dock slapped around the bottom of the desktop (until you opt to take away it, anyway).
When it comes to the worst bloatware offenders, we as a rule just spoiled the list for you. The foremost pernicious culprits include Roxio Creator Starter, the 30-day trial of McAfee Security Center and Dell DataSafe, which comes with 2GB of complimentary online storage. Besides, Blio, Cozi, Microsoft Office 2010, Skype 4.2, Nero SyncUp and Zinio Reader 4 come pre-installed, though these won’t get on your way.
Configuration options
The 14z starts at $600. All told, there are four core configurations, and all include Bluetooth 3.0, a DVD burner and a six-cell battery. The entry-level model, principally, sports a 2.2GHz Core i3-2330M CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB 5,400RPM hard disk drive, DVD burner, six-cell battery and Bluetooth 3.0. Moving up the ranks, the second one-lowest config ($789, or $650 after instant savings) has a Core i3 CPU, 6GB of RAM and a 640GB 5,400 RPM hard disk drive, while the second one-to-best config ($889, or $700 after instant savings) has a 2.4GHz Core i5 CPU, 6GB of RAM and a 640GB 5,400RPM hard disk. Finally, on the high-end you’ll also get a 2.4GHz Core i5-2430M CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 750GB 7,200RPM hard disk. That configuration costs $989, or $750 after instant savings.
In all cases, the CPU, RAM, harddrive, battery and optical drive are fixed, leaving you to customise details just like the warranty, lid cover and length of your security software subscription. a touch more control beyond this miscellany would had been nice.
The contest
2 If anything about this laptop — the stiff touch buttons, the sunken hinge — rubs you the opposite direction, the upshot is that each major PC maker is able to sell you a 14-inch laptop within the $600 range. HP’s best match is the 14-inch Pavilion dm4 , available for $580 and up with an analogous 2.2GHz Core i3 CPU, a 1366 x 768 display, a promotional 6GB of RAM and a promotional 640GB harddisk. The choices here aren’t as expansive as with another companies, like Sony: there’s an additional harddisk option (500GB 5,400RPM), one CPU, one screen resolution, one optical drive and one graphics choice. You desire something with more oomph? Get ye an Envy. Nonethless, though, these are the very best specs you’re going to get for 6 hundred bucks.
In Sony’s camp, you can actually configure the 14-inch VAIO E series ($500 and up) to match the 14z’s specs, but really, the C series ($700) and up is a closer match — albeit, a pricier one. For the money, it starts with the same 2.2GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, Intel integrated graphics, a 320GB 5,400 RPM hard drive and a 1366 x 768 display. What we appreciate about both of these VAIO lines, though, is that although they start with modest specs, they can be tricked-out if you’re willing to invest the money. Both, for instance, have optional Blu-ray drives, discrete graphics and beefier 7,950mAh batteries (up from the standard 5,300mAh). The E and C series go as much as Core i5 and Core i7, respectively, while the higher-end C series can be built with a 1600 x 900 display for an extra $50.
3 Though Gateway’s been branded as the lower-end second banana to Acer ever since Acer acquired it back in 2007, its all-metal 0 ID laptops 0 are actually more striking than what most other companies are offering at this price. It’s available in four configurations in the US, with the entry-level $630 offering a 2.2GHz Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, Intel HD 3000 graphics and a 14-inch (1366 x 768) display. Perhaps the most important spec here is that the screen is an LG Shuriken panel, which allowed Gateway to cram a 14-inch panel into a chassis normally reserved for 13-inch systems (translation: you’ll enjoy some seriously narrow bezels). At the high end, the $700 model steps up to a 2.3GHz Core i5 processor, though the memory load, graphics and storage capacity remain an analogous.
What’s funny is that although Acer’s long been pitched as the higher-end brand, its 14-inch Timeline X laptop, the AS4830, starts with similar specs. The entry-level $580 model also has a 2.2GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB harddisk, Intel HD 3000 graphics and a 14-inch (1366 x 768) display. Then again, the Timeline series’ claim to fame is its long battery life, which in this case is rated at as much as eight hours. We only tested the 15-inch 1 AS5830 1 , but we’d be willing to bet that the 14-inch TimelineX bests most of the laptops on this list when it comes to runtime. If you’re curious, the highest-end AS4830 sold within the US rings in at $730 and steps up to a 2.4GHz Core i5 CPU, a 640GB harddrive and NVIDIA GeForce GT540M graphics.
In the case of both Acer and Gateway, the biggest caveat we always feel compelled to make, regardless of specs, is that there aren’t any opportunities to customize your configuration. It’s true that the company is careful to offer multiple configurations and different price points, but you still need to have a take-it-or-leave it attitude when it comes to specs.
Moving on to Toshiba, its most comparable laptop is the Satellite P740, which starts at $584 with a quad-core AMD Fusion A6 APU, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB 5,400RPM harddrive and Intel’s integrated graphics. It, too, has a 1366 x 768 display.
Wrap-up
4 In many ways, the 14z feels rough round the edges: while Dell was whittling the chassis, it forgot to fine-tune the multitouch trackpad and ensure the touch buttons were easy to press. And unfortunately, the intrusive bloatware load didn’t even get a makeover. Still, the 14z redeems itself with fast performance, long battery life and a more robust (though hardly perfect) design. Dell’s clearly on target with this mostly metal design, beefy port selection and backlit keyboard, even though certain details just like the bulging battery and color blocked keyboard underscore how inexpensive it actually is. All of our quibbles aside, the 14z remains a robust choice for what it’s — a cost-effective, everyday laptop that’s more than enough for college students, kids and families.
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