Dell XPS 13 9350 review: The Windows ultraportable, perfected

There’s more to building a great laptop than you might imagine. You can combine cutting-edge materials and the fastest hardware, but it all means nothing if those elements don’t gel together just so. That, ultimately, was the undoing of the original XPS 13. Undeterred, Dell has made some subtle tweaks to the formula, and it’s these incremental improvements which have recast the XPS 13 as the best Windows ultraportable yet.

Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Design

When you’re spending a four-figure sum on a laptop, you want to feel you’re getting something special. You want a device that looks and feels like it’s been exactingly crafted; designed specifically to be the best in class. From the moment you lay hands on it, it’s quite clear the XPS 13 is all those things.

Cool, gently curved slices of metal span the lid and underside, neatly sandwiching the soft-touch expanse of carbon fibre that pools around the backlit keyboard. The design of the XPS 13 is understated, modern and elegant in all the right ways.

It’s solid, too, with not a hint of flex in its body, and it’s also surprisingly small for a 13.3in laptop. In fact, it’s a touch more compact even than HP’s 12.5in EliteBook Folio 1020, which is already pretty tiny as Ultrabooks go, and dramatically more slender and portable than Microsoft’s exotic Surface Book. 

It’s not the very lightest ultraportable out there. At 1.2kg in its non-touch incarnation, and 1.29kg with the touchscreen, the XPS 13 isn’t as light as the Apple MacBook. However, those extra couple of hundred grams have been put to good use, and it’s safe to say that it knocks the MacBook and the Folio 1020 – and much of the competition, for that matter – flat in almost every other area.

Dell has given the XPS 13’s engine a thorough overhaul. Intel’s Skylake processors are now in the driving seat, bringing with them the promise of longer battery life and much improved graphics performance. More exciting still, the SSDs on all but the very cheapest XPS 13 now use the dramatically faster NVMe interface technology. This finally threatens Apple’s fast flash storage for speed. And one final magic touch: Thunderbolt 3 has arrived. Superfast connectivity is now just a USB Type-C cable away.

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Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Display

Upfront, the XPS 13’s display options remain as they were. You get the choice of a matte anti-glare Full HD panel, or a high-DPI 3,200 x 1,800 touchscreen on the pricier models. Whichever takes your fancy, one thing remains constant: the display bezel is absolutely miniscule. It’s enough to make other laptops look positively prehistoric by comparison.

I had the high-DPI model to play with, and it’s gorgeous. Windows 10 does a far, far better job than Windows 8 at scaling the OS and applications sensibly across its 5.7 million pixels, and the result is that most apps look stunning. If this was the only display you’d ever clapped eyes on, you wouldn’t even know what a pixel was.

Text is as crisp as you could ask for, and images look great thanks to the panel’s huge contrast ratio and wide colour palette. The XPS 13’s display reproduces 95% of the sRGB colour gamut and racks up a contrast ratio of 1,052:1, which are – take my word for it – very respectable numbers.

Oh, and if the uneven backlighting of the previous model was enough to make you very, very angry – or just mildly aggravated – Dell seems to have improved the situation dramatically here. There is a faint halo of brightness around the screen’s edges, but it’s nowhere near as obvious as it was. For a top-flight Ultrabook, these kind of details matter a great deal.

The only blot on the XPS 13’s copybook is Dell’s decision to retain the dynamic contrast feature from last year’s model. Maximise an Explorer window against a dark desktop background, and you can see the brightness dial slowly upwards. Shrink the window back down again, and the intensity dims. That might not sound like a bad thing, but it’s far too intrusive.

Why is this worth moaning about? Well, when you want your display to remain legible – in bright sunlight, for instance – then you can’t take full advantage of the display’s maximum brightness. With a full white screen, the display reaches an impressive brightness of 418cd/m2. With 50% of the screen displaying black, and 50% white, the brightness dims to 242cd/m2 – which is a big, big drop.

Thankfully, though, Dell has finally come through with a fix. Or at least it has for owners of the QHD model that I have here. If you want to be able to toggle dynamic contrast on and off you can head over to Dell’s support site here and download a required firmware update.

Looking at buying the Full HD model instead? Then there’s some bad news: Dell hasn’t yet provided a firmware update for that model, and it doesn’t look it will be doing so anytime soon. If dynamic contrast is a deal-breaker then you’re left with one option: spend the extra on the QHD model. 

Next page: Performance, gaming and battery life

Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Performance

The XPS 13 feels like every high-end Windows device should – seriously quick. The combination of dual-core Skylake processors and high-speed NVMe SSD storage make for a laptop that flies along in everyday use.

Take it to task with Photoshop CC and a huge pile of open Google Chrome tabs and it simply shrugs and gets on with it. The fans do spin up under heavy load, and the mid-toned whirr they emit is noticeable, but they’re not half as whiny and annoying as on the previous model. You can thank the cooler-running Skylake chip for that.

In our suite of really-very-demanding benchmarks, which includes 36-megapixel image editing and 4K video transcoding, the Core i7-6500U of our review model racked up some very respectable numbers. With an overall score of 46, it’s 12% faster overall than the Broadwell Core i7 in the previous XPS 13, about 5% quicker than the Skylake Core i5 in the Surface Pro 4, and 18% behind the Broadwell Core i5 in the 13in Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display. Plenty quick enough for pretty much anything you can throw at it, basically.

Raw performance is admittedly no better than its peers, but it’s the new NVMe SSD that has the most impact on how fast the XPS 13 feels. In raw benchmarks, it puts in the kind of numbers I’ve previously only seen from Apple’s flash storage-equipped laptops.

Read speeds top out at 1,390MB/sec, and while write speeds are a touch sluggish, maxing out at only 154MB/sec, those read speeds will have a far greater impact on day-to-day use. It boots up in a matter of seconds, and restarts in only a handful more. This is a quick SSD by any measure.

Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Gaming and battery life

So, gaming. Skylake brings with it a dramatically improved GPU, and while it still doesn’t come anywhere near Nvidia’s discrete chips for raw power, it’s still a welcome step forward from the Broadwell generation.

Let’s get one thing straight, though: you will not be playing games at Full HD resolution nor anything approaching high detail settings unless, like me, your main gaming thrills consist of slow-paced strategy titles such as Civilization V. Set your sights on 720p gaming with the detail settings dialled right back, however, and the XPS 13 will do its best to churn out playable frame rates.

I fired up my current go-to shooter, BioShock Infinite, and the Dell XPS 13 handled the action admirably. With the resolution set to 1,280 x 720 and detail settings dropped down to Low, I saw frame rates stay around the 30fps mark. In the in-game benchmark, the XPS 13 managed an average frame rate of 30.3fps, and that tallied pretty well with my hands-on experiences. Gaming is firmly on the agenda, as long as you don’t push the XPS 13 too hard.

You’d expect extra gaming power to come at the expense of battery life, but here there’s a pleasant surprise. With the screen brightness dimmed down to around halfway (it’s impossible to get the display at a set brightness due to the dynamic contrast) and Wi-Fi off, the XPS 13 kept plugging away in our light-use test for 11hrs 31mins, which is 66 minutes longer than last year’s model. An hour extra battery life and better performance. That’ll do nicely.

Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Keyboard and touchpad

I’m something of a fan of the keyboards on Dell’s XPS laptops (barring the horrid XPS 11, anyway), and here the XPS 13 doesn’t disappoint. The backlighting is adjustable through three brightness levels, and each and every key engages with a solid, muffled click that makes it easy to touch-type quickly and accurately.

Is it as good as the HP Elitebook Folio 1020, one of my favourite laptop keyboards of all time? No, but it’s still very good indeed, and I’m sure most people won’t find anything to moan about.

The buttonless touchpad is similarly refined. It depresses with a solid-feeling click, and cursor control is pleasingly free of accidental hops and skips, and almost as nice to use as the touchpad on my MacBook Pro 13in. All I really missed in the transition was OS X’s selection of multi-finger gestures and, naturally, Force Touch.

That’s no fault of the XPS 13, but I do wish the touchpad hardware on Windows devices was as tightly meshed with the operating system as it is on Apple’s laptops. I use both OS X and Windows devices every day, and it makes a big difference.

Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Connectivity

One of the complaints levelled at last year’s model was that connectivity was lacking. That’s no longer the case, especially now Thunderbolt 3 has been introduced, with its compact USB Type-C port replacing the mini-DisplayPort on the previous XPS 13.

For those of us with a healthy supply of mini-DisplayPort cables and adapters to hand, having to go out and buy all new Thunderbolt 3 adapters will perhaps be a touch galling, but having a connector that’s capable of delivering 40Gbits/sec data transfers over Thunderbolt 3 – as well as compatibility with USB 3.1 and DisplayPort 1.2 devices – will likely make up for that.

And, after a little digging around the subject, there’s another benefit to the presence of USB Type-C: given a powerful enough charger, you can use it to top up the XPS 13’s battery, even when you’ve left the dedicated mains charger at home. In the unlikely event that you just so happen have the most recent Chromebook Pixel charger hanging around, that’s reported to do the job nicely. 

Otherwise, there’s little to report. There are two USB 3 ports – one on either side – a 3.5mm headset jack, a full-sized SD card reader, a standard miniature Dell AC power connector, and a Kensington lock slot for good measure. And, whichever model you can afford, you’ll get the same Dell 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.1 wireless chipset. This is all exactly as I’d expect. There’s no 4G option but, with a smartphone in your pocket, a wireless hotspot is always nearby if you need it.

Oh, and one final thumbs-up: I love the battery indicator. Dab the little button on the XPS 13’s left-hand edge, and five white LEDs light up to indicate the remaining battery level. Trust me, if you have a habit of wandering out of the office (or house) with a laptop that has almost zero battery life, then this is really very handy. 

Dell XPS 13 (late 2015) review: Verdict

The XPS 13 is a welcome return to tip-top form for Dell. In fact, there’s only one thing that really bugs me about the XPS 13, and that’s Dell’s stubborn insistence on forcing dynamic contrast on at all times. It’s a stupid decision, in my opinion.

That aside, I absolutely love this thing. I could wish for a better GPU – yes, I really do want a slim, gorgeous ultraportable that also plays GTA V – but it’ll be a few years until ultraportables routinely come with decent gaming-class graphics. As it stands, this is a powerful, light, lovely ultraportable that comes a hair’s breadth from perfection. I think I can settle for that.

Which model should you buy? Good question. I’d ignore the lowest two tiers of the XPS 13 and skip straight to the £1,049 Core i5 model with the high-DPI display and 256GB NVMe SSD. Is the Core i7 model I have here worth the extra £100? Probably not. Also bear in mind that, unlike Apple’s MacBook range, you can upgrade the XPS 13‘s SSD, so there’s no need to spend a fortune on the top-tier models – unless you want to, of course.

Compared to its rivals, the Dell XPS 13 is very sensibly priced. And compared to the Microsoft Surface Book, it’s an absolute bargain. I can see a lot of power-hungry users taking one look at the £1,399 model – with Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD – and hitting the Buy Now button as fast as they can. Given the cash, I’d do exactly the same.