Over the past few months I've been travelling with a number of the high-end business-class notebooks, including the Dell Latitude 7370 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. Both are terrific machines, the kind of high-end machines that any business road warrior would be happy to carry. In this post, I'll focus on the Dell Latitude, a 13-inch laptop that is very easy to carry.

At 12.0 by 8.3 by 0.6 inches, the Dell has a very small footprint compared with other 13-inch laptops, and at 2.76 pounds is very light for its class. Sure, there are a few consumer laptops that are thinner and lighter, such as the HP Spectre, but most sacrifice screen quality and/or the ports that business customers need. It's not a head-turning design—few enterprise laptops are—but with a carbon-fiber lid, it looks quite good.

One thing that keeps it so small is what Dell calls an "edge-to-edge" display, meaning that the bezels are very small, so a smaller box can fit this size display. The 13.3-inch QHD+ (3200x1800) screen is very high-resolution and looks great. I really appreciated the resolution when working in multiple windows. The Latitude 7370 has a touch screen, which I find very convenient on a Windows laptop. It isn't a convertible, but the screen does lie flat, which is often helpful.

One minor quibble is that the small bezel doesn't seem to allow space for a webcam on the top of the screen, compared to most laptops. It is instead configured with the webcam on the bottom left corner under the display, and I found that this made it harder to find the right angle for video calls.

Overall, the Latitude 7370 has a decent selection of ports including two USB-C ports (one for charging), a standard USB-A port, a mini-HDMI, a microSD slot and a headphone jack. Most of the laptops I've used have had full-size SD card slots as well, but a microSD is still quite useful. Like many of today's laptops, it lacks an Ethernet port.

In general, I love the idea of USB charging, but it is worth noting that despite efforts to make this a standard, today you'll still need the specific charger that comes with the laptop to charge it. So while in the long-run USB-C will make it easier to have one charger that handles multiple kinds of laptops, for now it's very difficult to find a charger (as it doesn't work with the chargers that most other Dell laptops use).

I thought the Latitude 7370 had a very nice keyboard, but the trackpad is a small and little dated; you aren't able to click on the trackpad itself, but need to use the physical buttons underneath it.

The biggest concern I had with the Latitude 7370 is performance. It runs the lower-power 1.1 GHz Core m5-6Y57 (Skylake) processor, which allows the system to be thin, and should also allow for long battery life. But for heavier use tasks, it doesn't match up to full-speed Core i5 processors. For instance, a portfolio simulation test I ran took 2 hours and 53 minutes on this laptop, about an hour longer than it did on the current ThinkPad X1 Yoga or the HP Spectre. In general I found the Latitude to be fast enough for all basic tasks, from email to Web browsing to Office, but it isn't the machine I would pick for video editing, or scientific or math applications.

Battery life seemed pretty good, although it depends on what you are doing. With the screen at its maximum brightness and Wi-Fi turned on, it lasted 3 hours and 43 minutes, which was about 12 percent more than I got with the X1 Yoga. PCMag's battery test showed it lasting 7 hours, 6 minutes, while other comparable laptops got around 10 hours. In the real world, say at a conference, with the Wi-Fi on, but with the screen turned down, I found I could usually get around 6 or 8 hours, which is decent but not spectacular.

To get a business laptop that's this thin and light, but still has the basic features that enterprise users want requires some tradeoffs, notably in performance. Still these tradeoffs make it very light, and thus very easy to carry. The Latitude 7370 is a machine that the typical executive would be happy to use.

Here's PC Mag's full review.