Dell XPS 13 Plus Review: Redesign Stands Out, But Battery Life Is a Disappointment
Laptops
Speaker 1: When you open up the Dell XPS 13 plus three, things are gonna jump out at you immediately as being kind of unusual, not necessarily bad. Just a little bit. Unconventional may take a little bit of getting used to now the first thing you're gonna notice, I think very obviously is the touchpad, which is basically a touch pad. You can't see, it's invisible all across the front wrist rest here. It's just one big empty expanse. [00:00:30] And you might look at it and say, oh, is that all touchpad? That's actually not all touchpad. And you almost wouldn't want that. That seems like a nightmare for Palm rejection. However, the touch pad is here. It's just not demarcated in any way. Now I found that messing around with it. It goes from the edge of the space bar on this side to the edge of the alt key on this side.
Speaker 1: So it's a regular size, you know, generous touch pad. And I actually found surprisingly that even though I think it's a big muscle memory issue, uh, I didn't really have a lot [00:01:00] of trouble staying where the touch pad was supposed to be. I would still kind of like some little faint lines here or maybe have this part just light up or something like that. But it wasn't a deal breaker. It's interesting to note, this is actually a totally flat piece of glass because of haptics built into it. It feels like you're clicking on it when you click down on it, but much like Apple's touch pads. It's not actually moving. It's not actually clicking down. It's just giving you a little haptic movement that gives you that illusion that said I'm a Tapper, not a clicker. So, you know, big [00:01:30] deal.
Speaker 1: The next thing that's gonna jump out at you is a little bit unusual about this. Laptop is the keyboard it's got these edge to edge. Flat keys really goes from all the way here to all the way here. Almost no space between the keys. They're just totally tightly bunched together. This was a style. I saw a bunch in the 2010s. I have not seen it much lately. It's back here maybe to give you bigger key caps, you know, more surface area on them, but keep everything very thin. I still [00:02:00] think a traditional island style keyboard is gonna be more satisfying to get a little bit more snap out of it. These are a little bit shallow, but it also was unusual, but not a deal breaker for me. Now, the third thing is the function key up here. As you can see, it's not actually keys.
Speaker 1: It is a back lit touch strip that runs all the way across here. And if you're thinking to yourself, that sounds a lot like the apple touch bar that, uh, everyone has a love, hate relationship with. And frankly, over time, it veered more towards hate and apple ended up dropping it from almost [00:02:30] every matte book. Well, here's a version of it here, although it doesn't do everything that touch bar from apple did, that was an actual O led secondary display that you could put basically anything on. This is just a set of function keys. It's locked into that. So basically you've got the media control, keys, brightness, stuff like that. Cool. And then if you hold on the function key, then you get F one F two F three F four and touching them. It frankly works fine. Now I have to say, I've never run into a case where if somebody had physical buttons for something, replace them with [00:03:00] flat fake touch buttons and thought it was better.
Speaker 1: That way I could still live with these function keys just fine. There may be one exception. That's the escape key. I think people use that a lot and they really like having a physical escape key. I heard that all the time about the apple touch bar, uh, and that's something where I feel like you really do want to actually have a button. You can just reach out without looking and make sure that you press it. Now. Why did Dell get rid of the function key here? I hear it's because they wanted to make the system thinner. Thin is always good. This thing is about [00:03:30] 15 millimeters thick and that's actually impressive considering I can get up to a 12th gen Intel core seven P series in here that said, I think weight is more important. Maybe battery life is more important. Uh, thickness for a laptop is not actually as important as some people think it is.
Speaker 1: I also like that. This is a very configurable system, even though is, uh, Dell's premium version of the already premium XBS 13 starts at 1299. This figures closer to 2000 because I've got the upgraded CPU, we've got more Ram more [00:04:00] storage. I've got one of the higher end screen options. And that's something I really like is that you can get multiple display options on here. The least expensive. The basic is just a regular full HD 1920, uh, by 10 80 ish screen. Uh, you can get a touch version of that for a little bit more. This is an almost 4k, I think they call it three point 5k OED touch screen, which is awesome. Looks great. Uh, you can also just get a full 4k screen. That's not an OED one. I would say you would either [00:04:30] go for the OED screen, cuz it looks the best. Or if you're looking to save money, get the regular full HD screen with touch because frankly on a small windows laptop, you do kind of want touch, even if you're not gonna use it all the time
Speaker 1: Now, because I have, uh, a pretty high end CPU in here that, uh, COI seven, I thought performance was really great out of this. That said it's a lot of fan noise sometimes. And it [00:05:00] still gets really hot when you have a powerful CPU in a very thin laptop like this, no matter what you do, it's gonna get hot and the fans are gonna go crazy. There are actually some thermal settings you can go into within Dell's own built in app. They have like a performance mode, a quiet mode in optimized mode. That's one usually left it in the optimized mode that would supposedly balance power and performance and battery life and fan noise and heat. I still found the fan got kind of loud and it still got pretty hot even doing that. [00:05:30] Now, one thing I'm less pleased with here is the web cam built in up here.
Speaker 1: It's a seven 20 camera. While most laptops have moved to 10 80 cameras, full HD cameras. They didn't do it for a long time, but once COVID hit and people started working from home, there was a big demand for better quality cameras and laptops because we were doing these meetings all the time and shooting videos like this all the time. So even apple, which held off for the longest time now has really good full HD cameras in almost all of their laptops. [00:06:00] For example, it's in the new M two MacBook air and it works really well. This seven 20 camera Dell says some software behind the scenes makes it seem better than that. Eh it's okay. And it definitely was not great. In low light, you can do windows. Hello, facial recognition login with it. But again, I had some trouble with it. It was always telling me to back up or look at it from a different angle.
Speaker 1: Uh, not as seamless as I hoped it would be. And especially for something that's called the plus and has a premium price. I really want that 10 80 camera, better camera. I'm sure Dell would say [00:06:30] they couldn't fit it in the super thin lid like that. Again, I'll exchange a little bit of thinness for better components and you know, just a better overall product. The camera does have some cool tricks though. Again, if you go into the Dell menu, you can set up some, uh, detection features where if you step away from the laptop, it'll lock by itself. If you come close to it, it'll open up by itself. The coolest one I thought was called look away, detect where really, if I'm looking at the screen, it's on. If I turn away for more than a couple of seconds, I can see in my peripheral vision, the, um, screen [00:07:00] actually dims and that's good for battery life and that's good for privacy.
Speaker 1: And as soon as they look back, it brighten back up. You have to go in and turn that on to make it work. But I thought that was kind of cool. Now another compromise that wasn't crazy about is the fact that there are just two thunder boat, USBC ports on there. You might say to yourself though, that's what a MacBook has. That's fine. It's true. But that MacBook still has audio jacket, a headphone Jack here. They take that out, uh, to Dell's credit in the box. There's a USBC to us, B a adapter [00:07:30] and a USBC to he phone adapter. But if let's say you've got a charging on one port and you've got, uh, the other port being used to connect your headphones or your, you know, your headset for meetings, then, then you're out of ports. I'm not saying you need a ton of ports, but taking the headphones, Jack out phones do it.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure we're ready for that and laptops just yet. And my last big complaint about the XBS 13 plus, and I hate to make it sound like I have a ton of complaints cuz it's frankly, still a very nice laptop that I really enjoyed is for all the talk about performance and thinness [00:08:00] and portability. The battery life was not great. Uh, no matter how I tried to optimize it, it just did not come anywhere near what let's say a MacBook air would do, or even what the regular XBS 13 does. I would get maybe four plus hours from it. I found the battery drained very quickly. I really had to keep the plug with me or I had to constantly plug it to top it off. I did not have a lot of confidence. I could take this, put it in my bag, go out, go about my day. And I would not get stranded with a dead battery somewhere. I had to really make sure I had a USBC [00:08:30] charging cable with me now for something that is a very small 13 inch thin port of a laptop to not have great battery life. I mean, that's a real deal breaker for a lot of people. I totally get that.
Speaker 1: So the XBS 13 plus it's got a lot of really interesting design innovations. Some seem like they're really forward thinking. Some seem like they're just changed for changes sake. And some seem like they're sacrifices. You're making to squeeze everything into a very thin body. Now that [00:09:00] said, I wanna see some of these changes and ideas move into other laptops, other Dell laptops, maybe other laptop companies will take some of these ideas and use them, uh, for whatever the next version of this is. Uh, you can keep all the other stuff I would just like to see a better webcam and you know what, trade away a little bit of a thinness and give me a better battery. If you wanna read my full review of the XBS 13 plus along with all our testing charts and numbers and results, you're gonna find that link right down below.
