Dell Latitude E7240 review

With its tough 12.5in aluminium chassis and soft-touch rubberised interior, the Dell Latitude E7240 is a smart business Ultrabook. The Latitude E7250 is just 20mm thick and weighs 1.4kg, so it won’t take up much room in a bag or briefcase.

Even better, the E7250 has a wide variety of ports despite its slim chassis. There’s a docking port for connecting the E7240 to a workstation, as well as a Smart Card slot, an SD card reader, three USB3 ports, a headset jack and a button to turn Wi-Fi on and off. The E7240 also has an HDMI output and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

The E7240 is available in a variety of specifications, but our review sample’s 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 4GB of RAM made the laptop more than fast enough for everyday office tasks. Its overall score of 47 in our multimedia benchmarks is what we expect to see from the i5-4200U. Many professionals won’t need high-end graphics performance, so the i5-4200U’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400 graphics processor will be perfectly adequate. You certainly won’t have to worry about playing video and running presentations.

The E7240’s 12.5in screen was less impressive, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 59.3 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is around average for a laptop screen, but we thought colours looked more washed out than we’d expect because of the screen’s strong cyan, green and yellow coverage. Red, magenta and blue were all extremely short in our colour gamut, so our solid colour image tests lacked warmth and depth. Blacks were also very high at 0.65cd/m2 and they appeared as various shades of grey depending on the angle of the screen.

Our high contrast test images suffered from a lack of detail as well. With a contrast ratio of just 313:1, most of the darker areas of our photos simply appeared as areas of solid black, with almost no fine shadow detail to be seen. This won’t be a problem for business professionals mainly dealing in text and word documents, but it’s definitely not the best screen for working with or viewing photos and images.

Its 1,366×768 resolution doesn’t leave much room for viewing multiple windows at once, but our biggest concern was the screen’s surprisingly poor viewing angles. The screen’s matt finish does a good job of keeping reflections at bay, but we saw a big shift in contrast as soon as we tilted the screen back from our normal working position, which is a shame considering the screen has a generous 180 degrees of screen tilt at its disposal.

We’re not enamoured by the E7240’s keyboard, either. The keys provided a good level of tactile feedback, but the keyboard was a little too cramped for our hands. Fortunately, the touchpad was much easier to use and we appreciated its separate buttons. It took a while before we could swipe the touchpad to switch between windows proficiently, but we could perform multitouch gestures and display the Charms bar just fine. If you’d rather not use Windows 8 Pro, you can buy an identically specified E7240 with Windows 7 Professional preinstalled.

The E7240’s battery life was good, but not outstanding. It lasted 8 hours and 7 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, so you should get a full day’s work out of it. However, it still can’t match the near nine and a half hours of the HP Elitebook 840 G1.

The E7240 also has a wide variety of wireless features, including Intel’s Wi-Di wireless display technology, which lets you view everything on your laptop screen on another Wi-Di enabled projector or TV. The E7240 is also compatible with traditional E-Family docking stations and any peripherals with WiGig docking technology. Higher-end models have a SIM card slot so that you can get online when you’re out and about, but not the model reviewed here.

The lack of a SIM card slot isn’t surprising given the price of this particular model, but we would have liked greater consistency with the security features installed on models within this range. For instance, a fingerprint reader and smart card reader is only available on the most expensive model, and Intel’s vPro technology, an additional set of security features built into the processor, is only supported by the Core i5-4300U and Core i7-4600U specifications. Only a trusted platform module (TPM) is available for this particular model.

The Dell Latitude E7240 is an attractive business ultraportable, but underneath its good looks is a fairly average laptop. At £947 (£789 ex VAT), it’s also very expensive and not nearly as good value as the similarly priced Core i5 version of the HP Elitebook 840 G1.