Dell XPS 13 - Fast, Compact and Portable

Dell XPS 13 - It's About Time

We've waited a long time for Dell's entry into the Ultrabook market, so was it worth the wait? The XPS 13 boasts one of the sleekest 13-inch form-factors out there, utilizing edge-to-edge damage resistant Corning Gorilla Glass bonded to the lid to fit a nearly bezel-free 13.3-inch screen into a notebook barely bigger than most 11-inch models.

Additionally, the base of the unit is made from a lightweight carbon fiber composite that makes it ideal for racing around the city in unsanctioned illegal street races (probably not, but more on that later).

Design

It's hard to look at the XPS 13 and not think of Apple's MacBook Air. From the machined aluminum lid, to the tapered wedge-shape profile, there's more than just a passing resemblance. Of course, it's more compact and Dell has added a few extra accent touches like a shiny metal ring around the base, but let's be honest, they're fooling no-one.

Opening it up, you'll immediately notice that the lid is heftier than most other ultrabooks, a result of the combination of the thicker than usual aluminum used (it's nearly twice as thick as Apple's) and the heavy Gorilla Glass. While the hinges are smooth and solid, the notebook can be a bit tricky to open as there are no protrusions or cutaways to lift. Having said that, once you've got it, it can be opened one handed, thanks in part to the heavy lid.

Display & Audio

We were disappointed that Dell opted for the standard 1366 x 768 pixels resolution display, missing out on the chance to impress us with a 1440 x 900 pixels resolution like the one found on the MacBook Air or even a 1600 x 900 pixels display like the ASUS Zenbook's (ASUS has in fact just announced a Zenbook refresh coming soon with full HD 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution). Furthermore, the XPS 13 display is really glossy, which can make it a pain to use in bright lighting.

On the other hand, the Gorilla Glass itself looks gorgeous and the screen really excels when viewed indoors. Colors are vivid and it's exceptionally bright - Dell's spec sheet says 300 nits, but it looks brighter. Even with the brightness set to 50% for our battery test, it was more than enough for comfortable movie watching. We're just dreaming about how it would have looked with a higher resolution.

Complementing the eye-pleasing display, audio on the XPS 13 is a notch above other Ultrabooks. Interestingly, the speakers are hidden under the keyboard which, thanks to the wedge shape, lets them blast directly at you. It's a clever design, made all the more better by the XPS 13's extra loud volume and a crisp, balanced sound. Of course, it doesn't sound extraordinarily better, but it was a little more distinguished from the run-of-the-mill Ultrabooks so far.

Keyboard

The interior of the XPS 13 features a nice, soft-touch rubberized finish over a magnesium alloy base. The finish both looks and feels great and delivers the best of both worlds: staying cool after prolonged use, without delivering that initial icy cold touch of bare metal.

The XPS 13 uses a full-sized, backlit, chiclet keyboard, with finger-friendly concave keys - the same type we saw on the XPS 15z . There's a generous amount of travel with the keys, which makes the keyboard a lot more usable than the often too-shallow feeling of some other Ultrabooks. The backlight LED glows a bright blue color, which looks especially nice in the dark and if you leave it for a few minutes it turns off automatically - ideal when you're watching a movie with the lights off and don't want the distraction of glowing keys right below the screen. Additionally, we noted that the lighted keys aren't bright enough to distract you and has just the right amount of glow. The top row of fucntion keys double up as multimedia controls, while the arrow keys also function as Home, End, Page up and Page down. In essence, the key arrangement is almost typical of this class of compact notebooks.

Trackpad

The trackpad is one of the larger ones we've seen on an Ultrabook, measuring 60x100mm, although it's still a tad smaller than the one on the MacBook Air (75x115mm). Dell states that it's made of glass, but we can't be too sure as it has more of a Teflon coated feel and it's not as smooth nor fast as other glass trackpads we've tried.

Like the trackpads on other Ultrabooks, it's a clickpad without any physical buttons. You can perform a 'two-finger click' to right-click, or alternatively, a small line divides the bottom left and right side for right-clicking. Pre-installed software allows for some pretty interesting gesture options, such as a downward 4-finger swipe to show the desktop. The trackpad is responsive, and the gestures work well, although they're not the most intuitive, and might take a bit of getting used to. Probably a smoother and larger trackpad would have aided it further. One additional feature of the trackpad is its palm recognition feature to thwart accidental trackpad inputs and thus does away with the need for a trackpad lock function.

Connectivity Ports

If there's anything that holds the XPS 13 back, it is its minimalist approach to connectivity ports. Noticeably absent are HDMI, VGA, RJ-45 LAN ports, and a card reader. Almost every other Ultrabook has at least one of these four mentioned, making the XPS 13 one of the most sparse offerings out there. To its credit, you could say Dell had to make such a decision to help make the XPS 13 a much more compact notebook. After all, the mentioned ports are certainly good to have, but they are easily had via converter plugs and other USB-based accessories. In the end , you'll have to weigh the options if the lack of these ports would irritate your usage needs out of the box.

Does Carbon Fiber Actually Do Anything?

Flip the XPS 13 over and you'll see the entire base is made of a carbon fiber composite (except for a rather stylish metal ID plate that flips open to reveal the Windows product key and Dell service tag number).

If we've learned anything from watching movies like the Fast and the Furious, it's that carbon fiber mods all over your pimped out car make you a bad ass. Listening to our petrolhead friends, carbon fiber is pretty much the pinnacle of man's engineering prowess: it's lighter, it's stronger, it lasts longer, it's the Chuck Norris of man-made polymers. But as great as it may be for your car, will it actually do anything for your notebook?

Temperature 

According to Dell, the carbon fiber composite used on the XPS 13 is cooler and lighter than magnesium alloy. To test this, we took a laser temperature reading of the base of the XPS 13 at its hottest point (just under the vent) after running a movie on it for 5 hours, measuring it at 37 degrees celsius. We then did the same to our 13-inch MacBook Air, which registered 39 degrees celsius. Not a significant (or even noticeable) difference, but the XPS 13 was indeed cooler.

Weight

We weighed the XPS 13 at 1.36kg, while our MacBook Air weighs 1.35kg. However, the screen on the XPS 13 is noticeably heavier, so we decided to take the base plates off both machines. 

The XPS's carbon fiber base plate weighed 132g, while the magnesium alloy MacBook Air weighed 158g. Not a lot of difference, but again, the XPS 13 is still the winner. We also noted that the XPS 13's base plate dimensions are quite a bit smaller than the MacBook Air's, which could explain the difference in weight.

The carbon fiber composite didn't exactly blow away its competition, but still, it does seem slightly better on paper. In terms of actual user experience, we also noticed that the carbon fiber base had more grip and is less prone to sliding off your lap.

Performance Benchmarking

It's hard to look at the XPS 13 and not want to draw comparisons to the MacBook Air - so that's exactly what we did. For our benchmark comparisons, we pitted the XPS 13 against a 2011 edition MacBook Air (the most recent hardware revision) , running Windows 7 Home Premium via Boot Camp, and we also threw in HP's Folio 13, which has identical system specs as the Dell XPS 13. Just to see how much difference a Core i7 processor makes, we also included ASUS's Zenbook UX31 for more variety.

Futuremark PCMark 7

While none of the machines are performance powerhouses, PCMark 7 still gives a good indication of overall performance, testing common workload tasks such as website browsing and video playback, as well as more taxing operations like video encoding and graphics rendering. 

On most suites, the Dell XPS 13 outperformed the HP Folio 13 and was level in performance to the MacBook Air which was helped by its slightly superior processor. The Zenbook UX31 was slightly better across the board thanks to its Core i7 processor (although, we should note, not by enough to justify its price increase).

One test that the XPS 13 did perform noticeably better on, compared to both the Folio 13 and MacBook Air, was the System Storage Suite. While all three machines are running 128GB solid-state drives, the XPS 13 uses the newer Samsung PM830 mSATA model which includes an improved SATA II controller for faster sequential read/write speeds. By comparison, the HP Folio 13 uses the older Samsung MZMPA128 model, while the Apple SSD is a Toshiba OEM unit.

Futuremark 3DMark06

All four Ultrabooks use integrated Intel graphics as there's just no space inside them for a discrete GPU (if you want an Ultrabook with a dedicated GPU you need to go all the way up to 15-inch with the recently announced Acer M3 Timeline Ultra). As such, there wasn't much to separate them, with the XPS 13, MacBook Air and Zenbook UX31 all posting similar scores and the Folio 13 falling slightly behind.

Far Cry 2

Ultrabooks aren't made for gaming, but we can understand that sometimes you get bored on the road. Can the XPS 13 play games? Just barely, if you don't mind turning down your graphics quality settings and suffering through the occasional slideshow-like frame rates. Surprisingly, the XPS 13 was the best performer on medium settings, with the Zenbook UX31 unable to fully utilize its i7 processor (perhaps due to older drivers) although its slightly faster clock speed did help it stutter its way to an extra frame rate with the settings turned to high (which didn't make it any less unplayable by the way). All said and done, we would rank these notebooks on a similar playing field as far as gaming is concerned. If you're really serious about gaming on notebooks, at least look out for multimedia class of laptops to give you the advantage you seek.

 Battery Performance

Ultrabooks are all about good productivity performance, sleek build and long battery life. When we took the carbon fiber base plate off the XPS 13 we saw that its 47WHr 6-cell battery takes up approximately two-thirds of the inside space. For our battery life test, we turned off all network connections and set both screen brightness and audio volume to 50% (which was actually still quite bright and loud on the XPS 13). We then played a repeating a movie trailer until the machine powered down.

All four machines proved they have the stamina to keep going, lasting over four hours. The Zenbook UX31's more power consuming Core i7 processor saw it die first, while the Dell lasting an impressive 270 minutes or four and a half hours (just enough to let the credits finish rolling on the 263 minute epic Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Special Extended Edition). The MacBook Air (MBA) was slightly better, but not by a significant amount, with less than 3% extra battery life between them. HP's Folio 13 lasted nearly an hour longer, but the trade-off is the extra 140g of weight from its super-sized battery. 

All three Core i5 notebooks have quite low power consumption, with the Dell XPS 13 performing slightly better than both the MBA and the HP Folio 13.  

Portability Index

Our Portability Index is a measure of how portable a machine is, determined by its battery life, weight  and volume. Or in other words, how likely you are to throw it in your backpack and carry around for the day. Thanks to its small form factor and long battery life, the XPS 13 is one of the most portable machines on our chart, beaten only by the exceptionally lightweight (1.12kg) Toshiba Portege Z830. Considering our history of notebook testing and comparing these scores with relevant notebooks of similar size and class, the Dell XPS 13 is praise-worthy, even if it hasn't matched the Toshiba counterpart. There are very few notebooks that have crossed the 4.0 mark for the Portability Ratio and the XPS 13 has made it into this elite club.

In all honesty, the notebook feels a bit hefty from a pure weight to size point of view when we first started having a feel of this notebook. However, consider this - the XPS 13 rivals other 13-inch class notebooks with its more compact body (which Dell claims is equivalent of a conventional 11-inch laptop) and this is the reason for its perceived heft. After putting it through proper tests and crunching the numbers, the XPS 13 has definitely made a positive impression on us. Users looking to fit the most compact 13-inch Ultrabook in their backpack can surely rely on this Dell machine. Just don't expect it to feel lighter.

Attack of the Clones

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; if that's the case, Apple should be proud because the XPS 13 looks a lot like a MacBook Air. Having said that, we do like the unique touches Dell has incorporated into their design.  We loved the smaller form factor and the soft-touch wrist pad and, while it wasn't all that impressive, the carbon fiber base plate did at least prove to be equal, if not slightly better, than aluminum as a build material. Unfortunately, it wasn't any lighter given its compact nature and this made the notebook seem heavier than other equivalent 13-inch Ultrabooks due to the reduced weight distribution.

We also wished the display had a higher resolution, but the Gorilla Glass made it look gorgeous. Coupled with its good audio quality, the XPS 13 is probably the best Ultrabook for movie watching to-date (although we would like to add that it's nothing like a true gaming/multimedia notebook, it is still better than the norm for its class). Add to that a long, four-hour plus battery life and you've got the perfect personal movie machine for taking on the road comfortably.

Other highlights include the LED-backlit keyboard, which we found comfortable for extended typing and is a much needed improvement over the the far-too-shallow offerings of many other Ultrabooks. We also liked how Dell was able to fit a large trackpad in, despite the reduced form factor - and we particularly liked the little extras like the palm recognition technology that stops the cursor from skipping around if you inadvertently touch it while typing.

The biggest drawback of the XPS 13 - and probably a deal-breaker for some of you - is its lack of connectivity ports. As a notebook built for mobility, we can accept the lack of HDMI, VGA and RJ-45 ports, useful as they may be, but then, the lack of a card reader greatly reduces its credibility as a mobile machine. For all of the XPS 13's good points, other Ultrabooks provide a bit more immediate functionality without added accessories or fuss.

The XPS 13 is a solid entry into the Ultrabook market and a high performer on almost all tests. Even so, Ultrabooks have been around for a while now, and we expected more from Dell after waiting so long. While it does look nice, the XPS's MacBook Air design is uninspired and apes Apple just a little too much. It's a pity because we know Dell can make some sexy looking notebooks on their own (Adamo anyone?). While it's better in some areas, like its compact size and better audio, they don't really make up for the standard resolution display and lack of ports. In the end, with only a S$189 price difference between them (not including the cost of the OS), there's not a lot of strong reasons to consider the S$1499 Dell XPS 13 over a Boot Camped MacBook Air with its base price of S$1688 if you're after a Windows OS Ultrabook in this style.

It's not just about Apple notebooks as there are also equivalently good contenders from ASUS, HP and Lenovo at somewhat equivalent price points and offer more than the Dell XPS 13 in some way or the other. Once you whittle down the various specs and features across the competition, the Dell XPS 13 stands out in two key areas - a more compact 13-inch Ultrabook that offers excellent typing experience. Even so, we'll iterate again to think ahead to be sure you don't mind the limited connectivity ports.

All things considered, with the next wave of Ultrabooks coming soon with the Intel Ivy Bridge platform update expected later this year, you might want to wait for newer models to arrive. While we don't expect the new notebooks to look any different, you get the advantage of a newer processing platform - if you don't mind the wait. For those who can't wait, go right ahead to get a new Ultrabook now as it could be a little while before adequate stocks are available of the updated notebooks.

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