Dell XPS 13 review

Dell's XPS laptops are renowned for their premium build quality and powerful processors, but the company has kicked things up a notch for the 2015 update to its XPS 13 ultra-portable - it's possibly the prettiest laptop we've seen in years.

Design and Build

Build quality is outstanding. It's just 15mm thick and only weighs 1.3kg, but is built like a tank. The palm rest is made from a carbon fibre-like material with a grippy coating on top, which looks and feels fantastic, but we wish Dell had coated the whole device in a similar material. The lid retains the same grey metal as previous XPS models, meaning it doesn't feel like quite a giant leap forward from the previous model.

The XPS 13's most striking feature is what Dell calls the "infinity screen", a 13.3 touchscreen display with tiny 5mm bezels on the left, right and top. This kind of near-borderless experience is something we've seen on tablets before but never in laptops. Not only does the lack of bezels pull the screen into focus, it also reduces the laptop's footprint by about an inch diagonally, making it noticeably smaller than a 13in MacBook Pro.  A consequence of the tiny bezel is that your fingers and thumbs will touch the display if you grip the lid as you open and close it, which can result in accidentally registering touchscreen inputs.

To keep the bezel small, the webcam has been moved to the bottom left rather than the top. Despite the strange placement, the camera is configured so your face will still be at the centre of the screen. We found the microphone to be a bit muffled, though, which rather limits its usefulness.

Infinity Screen

The 3,200x1,800 screen is very good for the most part, but there are niggles that feel a bit out of place on a laptop this expensive. sRGB colour gamut coverage is reasonably high at 92.7%, and contrast levels of 1168:1 are very respectable. However, this great quality is spoiled by some backlight bleed at the bottom left corner of the panel, which is noticeable on both light and dark images.

A quirk of the screen is its adaptive brightness function, which can't be turned off through Windows power management settings. The display backlight adjusts itself automatically depending on what's shown onscreen; the change is so slow it's barely noticeable unless you're really looking for it, but it can make a difference of more than 100cd/m2. The effect will be particularly irritating to photographers. If you zoom in close on an area of an image, it will appear darker or lighter than how it appeared when you were fully zoomed out, which means accurate editing will be difficult. Considering that this laptop would otherwise be the perfect in-the-field tool for photographers, this is disappointing. For everyone else this probably won't be such a huge problem, though, and it didn't affect us when we were using the laptop for non-colour-sensitive tasks.

Windows application scaling also remains an issue. While most commonly used applications now work reasonably well with high-dpi displays, there are many legacy applications that won't scale properly and therefore appear as microscopic windows on screen with illegible text and tiny buttons. Even with Windows scaling turned up to maximum, some applications are still very tricky to use. If you use applications that are likely to be affected we'd be tempted to recommend the cheaper Full HD specification over this high resolution model, but we can't vouch for the quality of the panel or the performance of the less powerful Core i5 CPU.

Connectivity, keyboard and touchpad

The laptop's built-in speakers are excellent. There's an impressive amount of stereo separation, with left and right channel audio coming from either side of the laptop and sounds such as speech appear to be coming out of the keyboard tray.

The speakers are joined by a single USB3 port on either side of the laptop, along with a mini DisplayPort connector and 3.5mm audio jack on the left and an SD card reader on the right. A battery level indicator activates with a small button, even when the laptop is asleep or switched off. You also get 802.11ac Wi-Fi for better performance and higher speeds than 802.11n wireless. There's no Ethernet port, though, and an adapter isn't supplied in the box. If you need one, you can buy a USB to fast Ethernet adaptor for around £8. All models of the Dell XPS 13 come with SSDs in place of mechanical hard disks, and our example was fitted with a 256GB model. We went from a cold boot to ready to use in speedy 26 seconds.

The keyboard is comfortable and responsive, with plenty of travel and a springy keypress action. The touchpad, often the weakest point of many laptops, is up there with the best of them, too. It's made from a low-grip material and is very sensitive, meaning swiping around the screen, performing gestures and using the built-in click buttons is a genuinely pleasant experience.

Performance and battery life

The dual-core 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-5500U was extremely sprightly paired with 8GB of RAM is, scoring 83 in the image editing element of our new benchmarking tests. The more challenging video editing and multitasking tests were somewhat slower - 48 and 23 respectively - giving the XPS 13 a still very respectable overall score of 41. In real terms, this translates to responsive performance when browsing image and ad-heavy websites, and reasonable performance when editing photos.

The integrated Intel HD Graphics 5500 is surprisingly capable, too. In our laptop Dirt Showdown benchmark running at 1,280x720 pixel resolution, 4x anti-aliasing and High settings, it achieved a just-about-playable result of 28fps. You'll definitely be able to do some light gaming on this laptop as long as you're happy to turn the graphics settings down and drop the resolution.

Things get heated when the processor is challenged to more than simple web browsing, however, with the left corner of the palm rest getting noticeably (if not uncomfortably) warm. The fan only kicks in when the laptop is under moderate load, such as playing a high resolution video, and only gets noticeably loud when you really push things to the limits, which, for us, was when running our benchmarks. It also briefly kicks in when you first log into Windows 8.1 but soon dies down.

Battery life is reasonable but not spectacular. The cells in the XPS 13 lasted 5h51m in our moderate usage test, which involves scrolling through a web page and watching a video every half an hour with the screen at half brightness. With fairly conservative usage you could probably get 7h from it, but we'd recommend taking the small power brick with you anyway if you venture away from your desk.

Conclusion

The Dell XPS 13 is one of the finest-looking Windows laptops ever built. With a powerful processor, an SSD and a bag-friendly 1.3kg weight, it's a seriously impressive technical feat. We have reservations about the screen, though. The tiny bezels are gorgeous and screen performance alone is good, but the problems with scaling, backlight bleed and automatic brightness may prove irksome to some, even if they aren't deal breakers. As it stands, the XPS 13 is a standout premium Ultrabook.

Not for you? Take a look at our frequently updated Best Laptops 2015 guide.