Dell Latitude 7389 2-In-1 - Review 2022

Corporate types, especially route warriors, tend to prefer business laptops made from boring black plastic. Or at least, their It departments give them ho-hum black plastic laptops and they aren't complaining. The Dell Latitude 7389 (starts at $1,149; $1,967 as tested) is one of these boring black laptops, but with a twist—literally. You can rotate the screen through 360 degrees to transform it into a tablet. It's a bit bulkier and heavier than an equivalent consumer 2-in-1 laptop would be, only its superb build quality and Intel Core i7 power make up for that. Whether or non it'southward worth the loftier price is an open question, however, specially because the fierce competition, including our Editors' Choice, the HP EliteBook x360 1030 G2.

Looking the Part

Fifty-fifty though business laptops mostly have boring black exteriors, there's a definite hierarchy amongst all that boring blackness. For decades, Lenovo'southward ThinkPad laptops (previously made by IBM), have been the gilded standard, prized for their excellent keyboards, durability, and of course the red pointing stick. That's not to say the competition from Dell is necessarily whatever less well-built, which is certainly the case with the 13-inch Breadth 7389. It looks and feels incredibly solid, with almost no flex in the keyboard deck or the display hat. The hinges are as well satisfyingly stiff, assuasive your fingers to tap on the glossy 13.iii-inch full HD (1,920 past i,080) bear upon screen in Laptop way without whatsoever bounciness.

All that sturdiness means that the Latitude 7389 is a bit heavier than competing 2-in-1s, and much heavier than Windows tablets with detachable keyboards. This review unit weighs iii.06 pounds, which is about the same as the Lenovo Yoga 920 (3.02 pounds) but a few ounces heavier than the HP Elitebook x360 (2.82 pounds) and the Microsoft Surface Pro detachable tablet (two.45 pounds with its keyboard attached). The copious amount of black plastic, which covers the interior and exterior of the clamshell, is slightly soft to the touch. That results in a pleasingly premium experience, ane that many road warriors will adopt to the hard matte silver finishes of the business-laptop-design-trend-bucking HP EliteBook series.

The keyboard, however, comes upwardly a bit short when compared with Lenovo'southward offerings. The ThinkPad T470's keyboard is the best one on a concern laptop that we've tested recently, and its keys are larger and their travel longer than on the Latitude 7389. Someone with large fingers who types forcefully will likely detect the keys uncomfortable, but at least they are backlit for use in a darkened airplane cabin. On this review unit, there is no fingerprint reader below the directional keys to brand logging in to your Windows account easier, but it'due south an optional extra, as is a smart card reader for multifactor authentication.

All Most That Bezel

In fact, Microsoft is pushing for Information technology departments to use confront detection or fingerprints every bit a form of multifactor authentication to log in to Windows, and then a webcam that supports Windows Howdy face recognition is also an optional actress. The webcam on our review unit doesn't support Windows Hello, but information technology does offer decent picture quality for videoconferencing, and it's tiny enough that Dell could squeeze information technology into the incredibly narrow screen bezel. Narrow bezels are all the rage in laptop design these days, just it's nice that Dell leaves enough room for a photographic camera. The Dell XPS 13, by contrast, has an even narrower edge effectually the screen that relegates its webcam to the lower left edge of the display, where it mainly captures your knuckles and nostrils. Note that if you order the version of the Latitude 7389 with the face detection photographic camera, it will come with a larger bezel to fit the infrared sensors required.

Port selection is adequate for a 2-in-i, and nosotros peculiarly capeesh that Dell includes an HDMI port on the left edge, which despite innovations like Chromecast is all the same a necessity for anyone who needs to speedily plug in to a conference room AV system. The left edge also includes 2 USB-C ports and a USB 3.1 port. Along the right edge are a second USB iii.1 port, a Noble lock slot, and a microSD card slot. Taking a cue from tablets like the iPad Pro, Dell also includes a volume rocker and the ability button on the correct border, although you can certainly control volume levels the conventional mode, using the Fn keys or the icon in the Windows taskbar.

While the Latitude 7389 is in Laptop mode, you'll primarily interact with information technology as you would any other notebook, by using the adequately responsive and decently sized touchpad. Our just gripe about the pad is that it'southward not clickable. Instead, you lot must either tap or utilise the dedicated left and right buttons beneath it. Of course, it's no friction match for the humongous and luxurious glass touchpad with Forcefulness Touch on that yous'll notice on the Apple tree MacBook Pro. Nosotros're withal waiting for a touchpad of that quotient to show up on a Windows device.

When you convert the Latitude 7389 to Tablet manner or Tent way (in which the screen is rotated but a few degrees short of 360 to allow the device to stand up on your desk similar a tent), y'all'll use the bear upon screen to navigate through menus and the on-screen keyboard to blazon. Dell also offers a stylus that's useful for note taking and drawing. Like competing offerings from HP and Lenovo, Dell's stylus uses Wacom "active pen" engineering to mimic the feel of writing on newspaper, and scribbling on the Breadth 7389 is indeed extremely authentic, though not quite the aforementioned as a plain former legal pad. Perhaps the best function about Dell'south pen is that information technology magnetically attaches to the left edge of the laptop, a far better solution than Lenovo's plastic holder, which you must plug into a spare USB port. Unfortunately, Dell's pen is a pricey $49 add together-on.

Standard wireless connectivity options include Bluetooth iv.1 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and you can add a wireless modem as an optional extra. Dell offers all-encompassing warranty options for Latitude laptops, with several choices for length and type of service. The blank minimum warranty included at no additional cost lasts for one-twelvemonth and includes onsite service.

Bountiful Component Options

Storage and memory options are plentiful as well. Our review unit comes with a generous 16GB of retentiveness and a slightly less generous 256GB SSD. Moving up to a 512GB SSD will cost an additional $159, and in that location'southward fifty-fifty an option for a 1TB SSD, which costs $457. Meanwhile, if all your work is in the cloud, you lot tin opt for a 128GB drive to save some money. The 128GB and 256GB drives are available in either SATA or the speedier NVMe interfaces, while the 512GB and 1TB drives are NVMe-only.

Performance from the Intel Cadre i7 CPU is more than adequate for the types of everyday computing tasks that corporate route warriors are likely to perform on a daily basis, including give-and-take processing, video conferencing, and spider web browsing. On our PCMark 8 criterion, which approximates performance on these types of tasks, the Latitude 7389 earned a class-leading score of three,323. Anything above iii,000 on this test is first-class, though, and its principal competitors from HP (the Elitebook x360 1030) and Lenovo (the ThinkPad X1 Yoga) each exceeded this threshold.

Checking emails on the route is like shooting fish in a barrel; a more nuanced question is how the Latitude 7389 will perform once y'all're dorsum in the role, possibly to plug into a big full HD monitor and crunch some numbers in Microsoft Excel or edit architectural drawings. While it's certainly non equally capable as a similarly priced business desktop, the Latitude 7389 is a fine choice for these tasks. It finished our Handbrake video-encoding test in 2 minutes, 10 seconds, and took 3:19 to complete a serial of image edits in Photoshop. These are quick times for a laptop, simply each of its competitors posted similar results.

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Where each motorcar diverges noticeably is on our battery-rundown test, which involves playing a local video file at l percent screen brightness with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disabled until the battery dies. Unfortunately, the Latitude 7389 finished virtually the bottom among its competitors, with a time of ix hours and 1 minute. Our battery life leader, the Elitebook x360, posted a time of xiv:03. All of the other laptops in this category manage times in a higher place 10 hours, with the exception of the consumer-oriented HP Spectre x360 13.

Dell Latitude 7389 Graphics Performance Chart

A sparse and lite 2-in-i shouldn't be expected to offering stellar gaming performance, and the Latitude 7389 is no exception. Forth with its competitors, it's equipped with an Intel HD Graphics 620 integrated GPU, which can barely run graphics-intensive titles fifty-fifty with their quality settings turned down to medium, as evidenced by the sub-30-frames-per-2d results we saw on the Valley and Heaven gaming simulations.

Find a Better Battery

Dell checks a lot of boxes with the Breadth 7389. It's got the understated black styling and durability necessary to please many corporate users, and a laptop that converts into a tablet is a especially useful tool for employees who travel frequently. Fifty-fifty if its used mostly in Laptop mode, its sturdier hinges reduce screen bounce when you're tapping on the impact screen.

IT departments and pocket-size businesses prepared to shell out around $2,000 for a premium ii-in-1 convertible tablet have many to choose from, and the Breadth 7389's underwhelming battery life is i of the few things that helps information technology stand up out from the competition—and not in a good style. If yous're not wedded to black plastic, the HP Spectre x360 1030's superior battery life and similar calculating performance is worth a look.