Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (Snapdragon X Plus) review: A compact Snapdragon laptop for under a grand

Dell’s new Inspiron 14 Plus is one of the first Snapdragon Co-Pilot+ laptops to arrive after the buzz and excitement of the brand launch back in June. It’s a sign of the increasing ubiquity of these new Windows-on-ARM laptops that are now being slipped into existing model lineups alongside models running on Intel chips.

Unsurprisingly, these new models are not quite as interesting or exciting as the launch machines. They are being sold on workaday merits like value for money and battery life. In short, they are targeted at people who want affordable functionality not a piece of tech objet d’art.

And that’s the very essence of Dell’s Inspiron range. These are products that don’t have you drooling over them when you get them out of the box but will deliver a good few years of reliable, unobtrusive service. The Inspiron brand and Snapdragon hardware should be a perfect combination.

Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: What you need to know

It’s a measure of the success of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X-series chips and their associated Windows-on-ARM laptops that there’s been so little discussion about compatibility issues. The initial absence of VPNs for Windows-on-ARM was quickly fixed by NordVPN, while Google is still saying it will have an ARM-native version of its desktop sync app by year-end.

In one fell swoop Qualcomm and Microsoft have banished the memories of Windows RT and previous gutless Snapdragon chipsets and put Apple on the back foot in regards to battery life, an arena it was once the undisputed master of. This success means we can expect more and more Snapdragon laptops to appear in the coming months and they should become a staple of the laptop market.

Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Snapdragon X Plus, X1P-64-100, Qualcomm Adreno GPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 14in, 60Hz, 2,560 x 1,600 IPS display; Price when reviewed: £899

The Inspiron 14 Plus is available with either the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus X1P-64-100 or the 12-core X1E-80-100 X Elite chipset. Regardless of processor, you get the same 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU.

The 80-100 model comes with a 1TB SSD as standard and will set you back £899 while the 64-100 machine can be had with either a 512GB SSD for £749 or a 1TB drive for £899.

• Acer’s Swift 14 AI is one of the very few laptops that can run for more than 24 hours on a single charge. The display is rather humdrum but the webcam is excellent. Performance is also good and at £1,200 it’s a good buy
• The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is available in both 15in and 13.8in guises with prices ranging from £899 to £1,749 with all the trimmings. It’s a lovely-looking machine with great battery life. The only negative is that the 15in model is a bit heavy
• If you want great battery life without Windows-on-Arm then the new Intel Lunar Lake-powered Asus Zenbook S 14 is just what the doctor ordered. A beautiful little laptop, the S 14 boasts great battery life and an excellent OLED display. Not cheap at £1,750 but worth every penny

• The Apple MacBook Air is the doyen of super-light slim laptops. Even though the Windows competition is closing in on Apple’s slender stalwart, it’s still a supremely capable and desirable laptop and good value, starting at just £1,099

• Playing the value card for all its worth is Huawei’s MateBook 14 Core Ultra which has an excellent OLED screen and good sound system all wrapped up in a smart, slim and light body. For the money, it’s hard to beat especially the Core Ultra 5 model which is selling for just £750

Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: Design and key features

• Very limited post-purchase upgrade options
• Solid aluminium chassis
• Two USB-C 4.0 ports

The new Snapdragon-powered Inspiron 14 Plus looks rather similar to the Meteor Lake model launched earlier in the year. The design differences include some reconfigured cooling vents, a change in the array of ports and the addition of an extra pair of speakers and grilles flanking the keyboard.

This being a mid-range Inspiron, you won’t find features like the seamless glass touchpad, capacitive function row or zero-lattice keyboard that make Dell’s trendy XPS models stand out from the crowd.

The Inspiron 14 Plus is, nonetheless, well made and it feels like it should take a fair degree of abuse before it falls apart. The lid is more wobbly than you’d find if the display was fully laminated below a glass screen but the base is sturdy and primarily constructed from aluminium.

There’s only one colourway available, which Dell calls Ice Blue, but I’d describe my review unit as silver rather than blue. More important than the name is the fact that the finish is great at resisting greasy fingerprint smudges.

Weighing just under 1.3kg and with a footprint of 314 x 224mm (WD), the Dell compares well with the king of the ultraportables, the MacBook Air, though the Apple machine is thinner at 11.3mm to the Dell’s more portly 16mm.

The Dell has a decent selection of connections, too, with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports and a MicroSD card slot on the left, and a 5Gbits/sec USB-A port and a 3.5mm audio jack on the right. You’ll need to surrender one of the USB-C ports, however, to connect the 65W rat-and-tail PSU. Wireless communications are bang-up to date with the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 modem supporting Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Getting the plastic base off the Dell is easy enough once you have removed the seven Philips screws holding it in place but once that’s done all you can do is swap out the SSD, the battery and the wireless card. There’s no space for a second SSD and the RAM is soldered in place.

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Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Functional, flaw-free keyboard
• Crisp and colourful 1080p webcam
• Facial recognition and a fingerprint scanner

The layout of the keyboard is hard to fault with the possible exception of the half-height up/down arrow keys; the deck is solid enough with just a little give in the centre when pushed upon hard.

The keys themselves have a pleasant, slightly rough finish, a smooth 1.5mm of travel and a well-damped end-stop. The white backlight has two brightness levels, which makes for good legibility no matter the lighting conditions. There’s also a fingerprint scanner built into the power button in the top-right corner.

The 115 x 80mm touchpad is a decent size for a 14in laptop and the Mylar surface lets fingers glide smoothly across it, making navigation reliable and enjoyable. It has a clean mechanical click-action and makes very little noise.

The 1080p webcam produces sharp and colourful images in all but the most challenging lighting conditions and it supports Windows Hello facial recognition. This being a CoPilot+ laptop, you also get the full suite of Microsoft Studio Effect enhancements like background blur and automatic framing.

There’s also a manual privacy shutter and a raft of presence detection settings that can be set to dim or disable the display if the camera detects that you have left your laptop unattended.

Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: Display and audio

• Bright 2.5K IPS touchscreen
• Excellent 4 speaker soundsystem
• No HDR support

The Dell’s display is an IPS affair with a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz, and no support for HDR content. On the positive side it’s bright, hitting 491cd/m2, has sufficient colour coverage for productivity and basic media consumption, and is touch compatible.

The colour reproduction covers 99.3% of the sRGB gamut, which won’t satisfy anyone looking for a laptop for serious creative work, but at least it’s accurate, with Delta E variation versus the sRGB profile of just 1.3 (lower is better). Thanks to the screen’s high brightness levels the contrast ratio measured at an impressive 2,100:1.

While it lacks the sumptuous limpidity of the OLED screens used by some of its rivals, the crisp 215ppi pixel density, 16:10 aspect ratio and effective matte anti-reflection coating make it a versatile and usable display.

The benefit of having two 2W tweeters firing up through the grilles that flank the keyboard and the two 2W woofers firing through the slit grilles below them cannot be overestimated: the sound quality is excellent.

A maximum volume of 73.6dBA as measured against a pink noise source at 1m may not sound remarkable, but the sound the Dell produces is full, spacious, balanced, detailed and underpinned by a useful dollop of bass.

Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: Performance and battery life

• Low capacity battery hampers run time
• Good performance
• Runs cool and quiet

The ten-core CPU in our review machine proved more than capable of matching the competition scoring 12,922 in the Geekbench 6 multi-core test. That compares to 12,741 for the Core Ultra 155H Huawei MateBook 14, 12,071 for the M3 MacBook Air, 10,308 for the Lunar Lake Asus Zenbook S 14, and 14,519 for the 12-core Snapdragon Microsoft Surface 7 Laptop.

In the GeekBench OpenCL graphics test, the Inspiron scored 20,688, which compares well to the Snapdragon competition though both the Huawei MateBook 14 and MacBook Air did considerably better at 34,483 and 30,529 respectively. At present, graphics performance is not a reason to buy one of the new Snapdragon laptops.

Putting the Inspiron 14 Plus under heavy stress saw CPU utilisation quickly drop to 40% while the GPU continued to run at 100%. The drop in processor performance was more marked than I’d have liked but at least the system ran with very little fan noise and no overheating issues, even in Dell’s Ultra Performance setting.

The Samsung-made 1TB SSD, however, proved a middle-of-the-road performer, recording average sequential read and write speeds of 4,258MB/s and 2,245MB/s respectively. Given the Inspiron’s price and intended role as a general-purpose laptop, those are satisfactory numbers.

It’s the same story for battery life. The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus lasted 16hrs 26mins in our video playback test, which sounds pretty good, but it’s a measure of how far expectations have risen recently that this seems somehow mediocre, even for a Windows machine. The Acer Swift 14 AI and Asus Zenbook S 14 managed longer still, lasting 24hrs 2mins and 18hrs 28mins respectively in the same test.

The middling performance is due to the Dell’s rather small battery, just 54Wh, compared to the Swift’s 75Wh and the Zenbook S 14’s 73Wh. Of course, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective. The Inspiron 14 still beat the M3 MacBook Air by nearly 90 minutes.

While the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus can still easily see you through a full day of pretty intensive activity, I was left wondering why Dell didn’t fit the Snapdragon model with the same 4-cell 64Wh battery as the Meteor Lake version.

Dell Inspiron 14 Plus review: Verdict

The new Snapdragon Inspiron 14 Plus is exactly what you’d expect from a laptop bearing the Inspiron badge: it’s good value and a thoroughly competent laptop with no obvious flaws or shortcomings.

It isn’t super slim, ultra light or made of exotic materials. If you’re desperate for that sort of thing, you’ll need to cough up rather more for the Snapdragon-powered Dell XPS 13, which in all but pauper spec with a Full HD screen will set you back in the region of £1,800. However, if all you need is a laptop with solid battery life to do your day-to-day work on, the Snapdragon X Inspiron 14 Plus is a very good choice indeed.