Notice: Minor Cosmetic Imperfections.
If you don't mind sacrificing screen space for a more portable design, Dell's new Latitude E7250 is an enticing portable workstation. The business notebook comes with a compact, 12.5-inch screen, plus a durable design, a comfy keyboard, good security features and all the ports you could ask for in a work laptop.
Design
The Latitude E7250 sports a simple, understated design, and that's a good thing. Its magnesium-alloy chassis comes with a matte-black finish that will look right at home in a business meeting. The lid, meanwhile, sports a woven carbon-fiber texture that's a bit more interesting to look at than the smooth finish on Lenovo's ThinkPad notebooks. Likewise, the E7250's tapered edges give it a more streamlined look than that of a boxy ThinkPad.
Dell's notebook is a bit on the heavy side. It tips the scales at 3.4 lbs. when configured with a touch screen, though it's a more manageable 2.76 lbs. without one. The notebook is still heavier than the ThinkPad X250, which weighs 3.66 lbs. with a touch screen. Other ultraportables are lighter than both of those notebooks, such as HP's featherweight EliteBook Folio 1020, which weighs 2.68 lbs. but runs on a less powerful Intel Core M processor.
Display
The E7250's 12.5-inch display is a bit smaller than what you'll find on the average 13-inch consumer laptop, but it's still sharp and spacious enough for everyday productivity tasks. The 1,920 x 1,080-pixel panel on our review unit produced crisp, clean text, though colors are a bit muted. On the bright side, it delivers a whopping 360 nits of brightness at its highest setting, which is significantly higher than the category average of 255 nits.
Our review unit was equipped with a touch display, but I would recommend forgoing that feature. Touch panels add weight and cost, without adding much useful functionality on a traditional notebook like this.