Dell Inspiron 15R review

Dell’s newly revamped range of Inspiron 15R laptops looks remarkably snazzy, having a design that favours soft lines and curves over the usual hard edges that you see on most laptops. This is highlighted by a two-tone colour scheme of brushed metallic black and silver on both the lid and wrist rest. They are chunky, though, and not among the lightest laptops we’ve reviewed. Surprisingly, the battery didn’t last particularly long in our tests, although five hours and 20 minutes is good for a general-purpose laptop of this kind.

The Inspiron 15R N0015R32 is one of the cheapest models in the range, coming in at just under £450, but it’s got an excellent specification that includes 4GB RAM and an Intel Core i3-2370M processor that achieved an overall score of 49 in our tests. This is plenty for any standard desktop task, including light image or video editing.

The processor has on-chip Intel HD 3000 graphics, which failed to produce anything approaching a playable frame rate in our Dirt 3 test at a resolution of 1,280×720 and high quality settings. You need to reduce the quality a lot more and disable anti-aliasing to approach a suitably smooth frame rate of around 30fps, but most 3D games should run at their lowest quality.

The 15.6in display feels spacious, even though it only has a resolution of 1,366×768. Its overall quality is pretty good, despite slightly poor viewing angles which require you to have the screen tilted at exactly the right angle to get a decent view. The glossy screen is also rather too reflective, particularly if you’re working in a brightly lit room. However, we appreciated the display’s brightness and intense colour. Red tones are very slightly oversaturated, giving flesh tones, in particular, a warm glow. There are both HDMI and VGA ports for connecting external displays.

The laptop’s built-in speakers, unusually located beneath its lower lip rather than in a bar in front of the screen, are loud enough and fine for spoken word content, but all but the most simple music sounds muddy.

It took a while before we were accurately touch-typing on its keyboard, but its flat, widely spaced keys provide a decent sense of tactile feedback as you type. There’s no numeric keypad, so the entire thing feels a lot less cramped than many other laptop keyboards. Needless to say, if you have a lot of numeric data entry work to do, this isn’t the laptop for you. A large trackpad is situated in the centre of the wrist rest, directly beneath the shortened space bar. It’s big enough to provide plenty of fine control over your pointer, but not so large that we were constantly hitting it by accident.

The 15R outclasses most similarly priced laptops when it comes to its range of ports, simply because it has four USB3 ports, but that’s it apart from 3.5mm MIC and headphone ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It also has a built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor and a DVD-RW drive. If USB3 connectivity is particularly important to you, then this laptop’s well worth a look, but for around £20 more, you can get our current Best Buy winner, the Acer Aspire V3-571, which has a better screen, a longer-lasting battery and a more powerful processor.