Gadgetory

dell has long touted their XPS 13 is kind of the gold standard for ultrabooks it's not gonna win over the hearts of mobile gamers or video editors but for everyone else looking for a sleek laptop that packs a punch Don's got a lot they want to show you after using this thing for about two weeks I have to say I think the XPS 13 is my favorite ultra book that you can buy on the market right now I'm Robert Rosenfeld TechnoBuffalo and here's why design is an important part of any laptop but I think that Dell really did a great job with the design of the XPS 13 it's made out of an all aluminum chassis it feels very premium lightweight in the hands and they said that they were able to fit a 13-inch screen and what would normally be an 11 inch laptop form factor and they were able to do that though it did leave the lives of a little chunky not very fat but it's definitely not the thinnest kid on the block as much as I love the design of the XPS 13 I'm not a fan of how hard it is to get this thing open what looks like a little microscopic lip on the front is just a charging leg which means that opening this thing is really a two-hand operation luckily once I got the laptop open and I started using it my frustrations really started to subside mainly because of that display Dell really prides themselves in the whole XPS line are having these super thin almost bezel s infinity edge displays and the one on the XPS 13 really does look fantastic our unit is running at a resolution of 3200 by 1800 it's a quad HD touch display and everything just looked really good on it video was super sharp and clear colors really seemed to pop off the display text with sharp and I really just loved using this display it also gets fairly bright up to 400 nits which made it pretty usable outside and definitely super usable anywhere inside you're getting a really beautiful display with almost no bezels but with having those minimal bezels there were some compromises made Dell move the 720p webcam that typically sits at the top display down to the bottom left hand side what isn't a big deal for me but for anyone who does a lot of video conferencing or Skype calls it's probably in the most unflattering position possible this is an example of the video and audio quality only built in HD webcam on the XPS 13 Audio sounds very muffled very tinny even a little crackly videos awful inside the XPS 13 there's kind of this carbon-fiber composite kind of soft touch it feels super comfortable and it leaves you plenty of room for your risks when you're typing on it's pretty average keyboard I say average because the keyboard was just okay for the most part it has good key spacing it's got some pretty decent key travel though at times the keyboard just felt a little mushy for my liking there a couple of days I got used to it and it felt a little bit better below the keyboard is the XPS 13 s pretty decent trackpad it's an okay size it supports Windows 10 s precision drivers you can swipe and scroll and zoom to your heart's content and we also had option the windows hello compatible Frank you print reader which for 25 bucks it was a no-brainer it worked about 80 percent of the time but for the price point it's an easy to use add-on that I definitely recommend before I jump into performance I just want to mention something I kind of like about the XPS line in general and that is kind of the price to performance ratio you can get an XPS 13 starting at $7.99 and it's not going to be a powerhouse it's got an i3 it's got four gigs of RAM but you can kind of customize along the way and add options and add a little bit more price point to get yourself more of a significant computer it's kind of nice that Dell allows for that customization that you can start at a low price point and still get a really rock-solid computer and go all the way up to and i7 with a 512gb SSD and get a really beastly computer for a higher price it's just nice that there's a lot of options along the way and I appreciate that but going back to that beastly XPS 13 the review unit we have is pretty much respect to the gills with the best of the best of Dell office RS has an eighth generation Core i7 processor 16 gigs of ram a 512 gigabyte nvme based SSD and intel 620 integrated graphics so that last component might be a little worrisome of courses isn't a gaming laptop it's not targeted to gamers though I will say that in my testings with games and just performance overall I was surprised how well the integrated graphics worked with that new eighth generation i7 the XPS 13 was able to handle pretty much anything that I threw at it throughout the day having that 16 gigs of ram is really nice even for the heaviest of chrome users with lots of tabs open I didn't feel like the machine was running slowly and having that 512 gigs of SSD storage space made me feel like I wasn't gonna suffocate the machine by having a few games in sold or having a few movies on the drive I was able to jump between programs like Photoshop and Excel in Word and chrome and the XPS 13 just kind of stood the test the time it handled anything that I threw at it and it never really seemed to slow down or be bottleneck by anything so it handled the typical daily workload really well but what about some like gaming and video editing for an ultrabook I was really happy with how it handled things like editing in Premiere Pro I was able to add at 1080p footage on this thing just fine full play about quality no timeline issues it just worked out really well it's not gonna handle 4k video editing but again this is an ultrabook so keep your expectations to what this thing actually is of course rocket League is not a game that's super Jeep EU intensive and it's not gonna eat away and a lot of that graphics processing power but I was still surprised how well it ran on this thing I was able to run by default right out of the box at 1600 by 1900 at high settings and got some really great frame rate throughout playing again the XPS 13 is a very solid contender and almost all the categories I've talked about before but battery life is where this thing truly shines during my testing browsing the web watching some videos on this thing I never once worried about draining the battery and I was able easily to make it through an 8 to 10 hour day without having to plug this thing in to charge and if you're even lighter user someone who just occasionally browses the web and checks email I think you can make it 2 days on this battery so battery life is great but when you're ready to charge the XPS 13 you might kind of look at the eye on this thing and start to scratch your head a little bit on one side you have a full-size USB 3 port and an SD card slot which is fantastic and on the other side you have a battery indicator light a headphone jack another USB 3 port a USB C port and then something that brings sadness to my heart Dells proprietary charging port the speakers on the XPS 13 are just okay they get decently loud they give a little bit of volume and a little bit of bass but I think you're gonna have a much better time plugging in a good pair of headphones to this thing or using its built-in bluetooth 4.1 to connect in even better pair of headphones to get a better overall sound experience and if you're in the market for a good pair of wireless bluetooth headphones the fine folks at Sennheiser sponsored this video and they also sent over their 4.5 OH Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones these things are bluetooth noise cancelling headphones with phenomenal battery life you could use them for up to 25 hours without that noise canceling feature and up to 19 hours if you have it turned on they have Bluetooth 4.0 built in and NFC for easy pairing and exceptional sound quality as well as just a super lightweight foldable and to carry around with you design I wore these things for a long time during my testing they were very comfortable on my ear I didn't get that weird kind of pressure sensation that you get when wearing some headphones they also have track controls on the side of the headphone so you can adjust the volume of the current track you listening to and also skip forward and back as needed and they also have a detachable cable so if you want to listen to these things plugged in and wired you can totally do that but if you want that fully wireless experience you can unplug that cable and do that as well if you guys want to learn more about these headphones check out the link below in the video description alright so let's take a step back and kind of wrap things up it's got great build quality really solid performance and the battery life on this thing is phenomenal and over my days of testing I really just enjoyed using this laptop so what do you guys think of the Dell XPS 13 I know you guys had a lot of comments on my last video telling me to check this thing out so now that I did what do you guys think is this gonna be your next contender for an ultrabook leave your comment down below and let me know always appreciate doing these videos for you guys thank you so much for watching I'm Robert Rosenfeld TechnoBuffalo see you guys in the next one you