Dell XPS 12 Laptop

Complete Review of Dell XPS 12 Laptop

Dell has managed to make a strong name for
itself as far as Ultra books go and it is once
again taking the lead in the Indian market
with the swanky new XPS 12. The smallest in the
series, the XPS 12 combines the same premium,
high-quality craftsmanship we’ve seen in the XPS 13
with a bit of razzle dazzle. It first looks like a regular
Ultra book, but with a quick screen flip, it turns into
a tablet!

Design and build

On the face of it, the XPS 12 looks like nothing more
than a shrunken down version of the XPS 13. Save
for the carbon fi bre fi nish on the lid, it looks pretty
much identical to its elder sibling. The chassis

is made up of a mix of carbon fi bre, machined
aluminium and Gorilla Glass for the display. This
makes the notebook extremely durable and sturdy
and it will happily take the beating of everyday use
without showing any scars. It’s quite light as well,
with a starting weight of 1.54Kg. While this is quite
light for a notebook, it’s a lot for a tablet.
The ports and buttons are arranged a little erently so that it’s convenient to use in either
modes. We have speaker grilles on either side for
stereo sound, a volume rocker and an orientation
lock button for tablet mode, a headphone jack and
the power switch to the left.

The other side houses
two USB 3.0 ports, the charging port and a mini
Display Port connector. There’s no card reader, LAN
jack or HDMI present.
You can switch to tablet mode by simply
rotating the display within the bezel itself. There are
latches that hold the screen in place when locked
into position so that it doesn’t accidentally pop
out when traveling. The mechanism is extremely
smooth and fl uid, allowing you to fl ip the screen in

 one swift motion. The back lit keyboard is the exact
same one used on the XPS 13 and just like it, the
battery is also non-removable. Overall, the Dell XPS
12 is very well-designed and built and simply exudes
style and luxury.

Features 

 The XPS 12 is available in four pre-set
confi gurations. The base model that we received
came with an Intel Core i5-3317U Ivy Bridge CPU,
4GB of DDR3 RAM and 128GB SSD storage. This
being a hybrid notebook, you get Windows 8 as
the OS of choice. The XPS 12 maxes out at a Core
i7-3517U, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Sadly,
there’s no option for a discrete GPU even if you
want it. The battery capacity also remains the
same. One good thing is that you get a Full HD
display as default, no matter which confi guration
you pick. The panel has very good viewing angles
and excellent colour reproduction, which makes
watching video or simply using Modern UI a real
treat. However, one side eff ect of having such a
high-resolution display on a screen this small is that
the desktop environment does not scale as well as
Modern UI, so everything looks really small. This
makes it a real task to work on text documents or
simply read anything without having to zoom in.

 Performance 

Thanks to the SSD onboard, the XPS 12 performs
very well. We recorded a very healthy read speed
of 420MB/s in SiSoft Sandra 2013’s ‘File System’
test. PCMark 7 returned an overall score of 4685
points while 3DMark Vantage scored 10,523 points
with the entry level preset. Video encoding and fi le
compression will also benefi t greatly here due the
SSD. Storage is limited here, so you won’t be able
to dump your entire music and movie collection on
the notebook.
 As an Ultrabook, the XPS 12 is extremely
portable and very comfortable to use even for
extended typing. The keys have good tactile
feedback as well. The trackpad is large enough
to use comfortably, but it tends to get in the way
while typing.
The weight of the XPS 12 can be a problem in
tablet mode,ven in tablet mode, pressing the power
button puts the XPS 12 is standby mode, so you
can’t really wake it up instantaneously. 

Battery life 

XPs 12’s battery life to be average.I
managed to get two solid hours, which roughly
translates to about 4 hours of good usage. You’ll
be able to squeeze out a little more if you’re careful
with your usage, but don’t expect too much.

Verdict and Price in India

 With a starting price of Rs 94,990, the XPS 12 is
one expensive notebook, even for an Ultra book.
While it does have a very good feature set, behind
the fancy new rotating screen, it’s a very average
performing notebook. The hybrid nature of the
device is fun, but we’re sure that the novelty
will wear off  after a while. The
Windows 8 store has still a long
way to go in terms of Windows
apps and until then, traditional
desktop applications will still
rule—and you don’t need a
fancy touchscreen to use them