Review: Dell XPS 15 (2012)

The soft palm-rest is actually very comfortable on the wrist and fingers, but it’s also a mixed blessing, creating plenty of finger and palm marks as you move. If you accidentally rub your fingernail against it, you’ll leave a mark.

Oily palms? Same sort of thing.

While we had no problem rubbing most of these away with our finges, we’d say that it wouldn’t take long for the matt black palm-rest to begin to look grubby.

The power brick hasn't exactly gone through a change, and you'll still need to carry two parts with you.

We’re reasonably happy with the battery life though, and given that the XPS 15 is a 15 inch notebook designed for performance on the go, the 4 to 5 hour battery life isn’t terrible, especially not with the 15 inch display it’s keeping alive. That’s on par with the MacBook Pro’s 2012 Retina model, though the Dell obviously lacks a screen with as much resolution as the Apple laptop.

If you’re not sure how much battery life you have, there’s a very well disguised battery check button on the base of the XPS 15, with white LEDs glowing just above it to indicate how many bars of battery life you have. Good luck finding it, though, because it is insanely well hidden.

The XPS 15 does have a better screen than a lot of other laptops, and Dell’s decision to use a 1080p full HD screen is a welcome one, with lots of real estate offered in this 15 inch 1920×1080 screen.

On the whole, it’s nice to see a 15 inch laptop showing more than 1366×768, the common low-grade resolution offered up by most manufacturers between the 13 and 15 inch laptop space.

While the resolution is tops, the brightness on offer isn’t mind-blowing, nor is the reflective glass covering the screen, which seems to show every reflection in the room, even when you’re looking at it spot on.

Then there are the viewing angles, which only seem to be usable from the left and right angles. Position the screen directly at your eye-line and you’ll be fine, that is until you lower your head and see the vertical angles, which result in the same washed out colours commonly associated with low-grade display panels.

It’s a shame too, especially since Dell’s history has yielded some pretty awesome displays in their dedicated flatscreen monitors, and the 15 inch XPS display doesn’t even hold a candle to the 13 inch display used in Samsung’s recently released Series 9 Ultrabook.

Conclusion

Dell’s 15 inch XPS for this year isn’t a bad computer by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not the best it could have been either, especially with a look that’s obviously trying hard to stare down the competition.

Customers looking for a decent Windows PC with a reasonably slim profile won’t be disappointed, but we’d look around before settling on this.

Overall
Features
Value for money
Performance
Design
Reader Rating0 Votes
Decent specs; High resolution screen for a PC laptop;
Touchpad mouse feels strange and carries a touch too much resistance; Combination of metal and rubber is a little odd; Screen needs better viewing angles and less gloss;
3.7