Consumer devices follow the current trend of lightweight and mobility. Laptop makers are aiming to provide users with not just a thinner laptop, but also powerful and rugged enough to handle your daily tasks and hectic lifestyle. Dell’s latest business notebook – the Dell Latitude E7440 is ever ready to deliver to its users with the features mentioned above. It is Dell’s latest ultrabook for business equipped with entry-level specs. You can choose what specs you prefer while purchasing the notebook online.
If you have been a fan of the Latitude series from Dell, you will surely love this one even more! The unit received for this review is powered by an Intel Haswell i5-4300U CPU at 1.90GHz. It is further backed up by 8GB 1600MHz DDR3L RAM and an Intel HD Graphics 4400 GPU. The display screen is a 14-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution LED Back-lit touch panel. Storage space for the E7440 is 500GB. The traditional keyboard has backlit options of up to 4 levels of brightness and the touchpad is equipped with multi-touch features.
Accompanying the specs of this notebook are 3 USB 3.0 ports, one Ethernet port, one network switch, one stereo headphone/microphone combo jack, one HDMI port, one mini-Display port, one full and half mini card slots, one Smart Card reader and one docking connector at the bottom of the laptop. The Latitude E7440 measures 337.0 x 21.0 x 231.5 mm and weighs 1.63kg with a 3-cell battery on board the notebook and comes pre-installed with Windows 8 Pro.
Picking up the notebook for the first time, you will be able to feel the build quality of the notebook. The exterior of the notebook looks sleek and professional as usual to blend into corporate business environments. The surface of the notebook is made out of durable, aluminium, soft-touch finishes and a powder-coated base. Underneath the surface is a Tri-metal chassis designed to survive challenging physical environments. Put it this way, the notebook is simply built for military-standard-810G testing.
The display screen is backed-up by carbon fiber with edge-to-edge Corning Gorilla Glass NBT. The plus point of the display is not leaving any visible fingerprint stain on screen after use. The hinges of the notebook is further reinforced with tough metal to ensure the screen panel does not flex flimsily when opening and closing the lid with one hand. So, imagine the notebook getting run over by a car regardless of weather and escaping without damage and you are still able to flip it open, power it up like normal and present your projects. Pretty awesome right?
Dell did not make changes to the appearance of the keyboard, staying loyal to the traditional keyboard with a pointing stick and left and right clicks. The keyboard is pretty much nice to the touch but it could have been more ergonomic considering the fact that users who use this laptop would want to type constantly. The pointing stick is pretty much useless to me considering the fact that I prefer the multi-touch gesture trackpad. However for those who love to drive their cursor around without removing their hands from the keyboard would find this nifty little thing very much useful and sensitive to the touch. Located at the top right hand corner of the laptop is a power button and three LED indicators. On the top left hand corner is the audio controls.
Performance wise, the E7440 scored remarkably good results in the benchmark tests. It gained a score of 7998 points on PCMark Vantage due to its Max Turbo frequency of 2.50GHz. Taking this into consideration, the processor works well for this ultrabook as it runs at 1.90GHz when idle and is a charging workhorse when heavy workload is being done on it.
PCMark 7 gave it a score of 3537 which is pretty much decent for its specs. Sub-category tests also show this piece of machine is capable of doing its job well.
The notebook is pretty much decent enough if you are working on spreadsheets, documents or slides. It is not recommended to perform heavy workload on it such as heavy photo processing as there will be a significant slow down in performance.
Battery life is very much important when it comes to mobility. You would want your notebook to be able to last you throughout your working hours while on the go. PowerMark had some issues generating results after a full run, but I did kept the timer on to see how long the battery lasted while running on PowerMark. Battery life lasted more or less 6 to 7 hours. The E7440 comes with a removable battery pack, so you can always replace it with a secondary battery unit.
Bottom line, this ultrabook is a tough kid you would want to own while going around your schedules and meetings whether on site or off site.
