(Credit: Dell)
Windows tablets remain a small but interesting part of the market. They tend to be lightweight and have pen support, which makes them very good for artists or other people who want to write on the screen, whether for taking handwritten notes or annotating floor plans. Most users still need keyboards, but the combination can produce very flexible machines.
Dell's new Latitude 7350 Detachable is the nicest Windows tablet I've seen. It checks all the boxes for weight and flexibility thanks to an excellent 13-inch display, a good keyboard, and impressive battery life. Unlike most Windows tablets, it’s designed for enterprise use, with features such as vPro manageability. But it's also the most expensive tablet I've used, which might limit its appeal.
(Credit: Dell)The basic machine is quite small, measuring 8.19 by 11.53 by 0.35 inches (the "optional" keyboard makes it 0.22 inches thicker). The tablet weighs 1.91 pounds, though I always travel with a keyboard, bringing it up to 2.79 pounds. Even with the included 65-watt charger and optional pen, the total travel weight is just 3.48 pounds, which is still pretty light.
The 13.3-inch 2,880-by-1,920 IPS display produces 500 nits of brightness, plus low blue light, anti-reflective, and anti-smudge features. That's important since it supports an active pen and is also a general touch screen. The pen is relatively flat and fits nicely into a slot at the top of the keyboard, where it charges. I'm not an artist, but the pen felt responsive, as did the display.
(Credit: Dell)The keyboard is also relatively thin, and for a detachable, it has a nice typing feel. The touchpad isn’t as large as those on most Dell laptops; it's what Dell calls a Collaboration Touchpad, meaning it comes with controls on the top that let you turn on and off video and audio, share your screen, or enter a chat with just a single click. I can see where that could be handy.
One downside is that, like the most recent XPS machines, it doesn’t have many ports. There's only a USB-C on each side (which does make it convenient for charging) and an audio jack on the left side. I understand this helps make machines thinner, but sometimes I would prefer an HDMI or USB-A port.
The Detachable 7350 includes both a front-facing HDR 8-megapixel camera and a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera. I used the front-facing one more often for video conferencing and found that it worked well, providing a crisp, clear image. Sound quality was adequate. Dell does not offer its own video enhancement features but does include Windows Studio effects with options like eye contact and automatic framing.
(Credit: Dell)To make it so thin, it comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 164U processor (Meteor Lake) with vPro support for enterprise manageability. This is the first Meteor Lake processor I’ve tested that runs on only 9 watts of base power, so I expected it to perform a bit lower than other Meteor Lakes. (Intel did not make a 9-watt version of the Raptor Lake generation of processors, so all the previous Windows tablets I've tried had an Alder Lake or older processor.)
The Core Ultra 7 164U has two "performance" cores, each capable of running two threads, and eight "efficient" cores on the main CPU tile, along with two additional "low-power efficient" cores on a separate tile, thus a total of 12 processors and 14 threads. The performance cores have a base frequency of 1.1GHz and a maximum turbo of 4.8GHz. It has "Intel Graphics"—meaning four GPU cores instead of the eight on higher-end Meteor Lake processors—but it does include Intel’s AI Boost with an NPU. The unit I tested had 32GB of memory and a 1TB SSD.
This lower-level processor showed up in my tests, lagging behind Windows laptops with higher-power Meteor Lake or Raptor Lake processors, but still generally winding up about where 11th generation Intel Core (Tiger Lake) processors were a few years ago.
(Credit: Dell)Converting a video file using Handbrake took 2 hours and 13 minutes, compared to 1 hour and 18 on the 28-watt Meteor Lake-based Dell XPS 14 (9440) (which includes discrete graphics) and 1 hour and 53 minutes on the 15-watt Raptor Lake-based Dell Latitude 9440.
MatLab took almost 48 minutes, compared with 33 minutes on a Meteor Lake-based Dell XPS 14. Running a large data table in Excel took 51 minutes, compared with 46 minutes on the XPS 14 and 38 minutes on the Latitude. In general, I've found Raptor Lake to be faster than Meteor Lake on Excel, probably because of its higher clock speed. Excel doesn't seem to use extra cores. I had similar results on AI applications where the Dell Detachable 7350 was slower in most tasks than the other machines I've tested.
That's not a great choice if you run particularly power-intensive applications, but it's certainly fast enough for most business applications, and I didn't notice any lag in my general use of Office or when drawing on the tablet.
On the other hand, battery life with the 46.5 watt-hour battery was good. In PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, I got almost 12 hours with 100 nits, and 13 hours and 21 minutes with 40 nits, which is better than I saw with the XPS 14 or the Latitude 9440. In this case, the low-power processor really seems to help.
As with all of Dell's enterprise laptops, the Detachable 7350 comes with Dell Optimizer, which includes methods of prioritizing the performance of specified applications, adjusting the power to extend battery life, and various audio features (such as removing background noise or enabling 3D audio). It also supports presence detection, which can lock your machine when you step away from it and unlock it when you approach using Windows Hello. It also has the ability to detect onlookers and dim the screen as a result. All of these worked quite well.
For testing with the Detachable 7350, Dell provided its Premier Wireless ANC Headset (WL7024), a noise-cancelling headset with a boomless design. I tried it in a number of meetings, and it seemed to work quite well, although I prefer earbuds to over-the-ear headsets. The headset charges on its own dock, which in turn gets power via USB-C. It works with a standard audio connection or via Bluetooth, and when I tried it, I got a nice little Dell Pair application that made the connection easy. I haven’t tested enough headphones to compare audio quality properly, but it sounded quite good.
The unit I tested did not have mobile broadband, but 5G Qualcomm Snapdragon WWAN options are available.
My biggest concern about the machine is pricing. A unit like the one I tested is currently selling for $2,793 on Dell’s site. And that doesn’t include the keyboard, which is $210 or $260 in a bundle with the pen. I have to believe that most enterprise buyers will choose the keyboard, but I suppose there are some who will use it only as a Windows tablet for looking things up or drawing. (A version of the tablet with an Intel Core Ultra 5 134U processor, 16GB of memory, and a 256GB SSD starts at $1,789, though you’d probably still want to add the keyboard.) Still, the unit I tested comes in at over $3,000, which will probably limit the appeal to those who really like the detachable format.
Overall, the Dell Detachable 7350 is the nicest and highest-end Windows tablet I’ve seen, with a terrific full-size display, a good weight, and a lot of enterprise manageability features. It’s a niche machine, but it fills that niche very well.