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Dell Inspiron 14 7000 Series
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Design and features
Maybe it's just that we've seen a fair share of Dell's more
budget-focused laptops over the years, but the Inspiron 14 7000
certainly looks the part of an upper midrange mainstream laptop. There's
no plastic lid with too much flex or polycarbonate bottom with multiple
access panels. It's all aluminum save for its plastic hinges and it
feels sturdy enough to stand up to a daily commute.
The laptop is
thin at 0.6 inch and measures 13.6 inches wide by 9.4 inches deep,
making it small and thin enough to quickly slip into a shoulder bag.
However, while it's not exactly heavy, at 4.1 pounds (4.7 pounds with
its power adapter), you won't exactly forget you have it with you,
either.
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Lift the lid and you'll see a backlit chiclet-style keyboard and a
reasonably large clickpad. With the laptop being so thin, there's
minimal key travel, so if you tend to hammer hard on your keys, you
might find typing uncomfortable. Also, while the keys aren't overly
small, there's so much room on the keyboard deck both above and to the
sides of the keyboard that it seems like the keys could be larger, or at
least moved up some to allow for a bigger clickpad. It does, however,
keep it looking simple and clean.
Media controls as well as
screen and keyboard brightness are mapped to the function keys and are
set to work without the Fn key being held down. The keyboard has two
levels of brightness or can be shut off entirely. The top left of my
keyboard was a bit brighter than the rest of the keyboard; certainly not
the end of the world and if you have to cut corners, I'd rather have
some backlighting than none at all.
The clickpad is responsive
and has a subtle texture to it that adds just enough drag. There is
support for multitouch gestures, however gestures for three and four
fingers are shut off by default. I also didn't experience any cursor
jumpiness from dragging palms across it while typing, but you can always
raise the palm-check setting if you do.
The 14-inch,
1,920x1,080-pixel-resolution screen is overall nice, but doesn't get
terribly bright. If you need something that's easily visible in bright
office lighting or daylight outside, you might struggle with the
Inspiron 14 7000. Also, the Gorilla Glass might be nice for extra screen
durability, but it doesn't do you any favors when it comes to glare. On
the upside, off-angle viewing is good, with just some loss in
brightness off to the sides and none of the inverted colors I've seen on
other similarly priced laptops.
The side-firing stereo speakers sound thin for both movies and music.
They can get quite loud without distortion, but you'll probably want to
hook up a pair of speakers or headphones for more enjoyable listening.
Ports and configurations
The 14 7000 Series is more about portability than being a desktop
replacement. The port assortment is lean with just two USB 3.0 ports and
not much else. If you need things like Ethernet or more USB ports,
you'll have to move up to larger-screen Inspiron 15 or 17 7000 Series models, or step down to the Inspiron 14R.
Worth
mentioning, too, is that the memory card slot only allows you to put a
card in half way. That means traveling with a card in the slot will
likely result in breaking or losing your card.
There is no
option for a built-in optical drive on the Inspiron 14 7000 Series;
you'll have to go up to the 17 7000 Series to get one or, again, switch
to the Inspiron 14R if you want to stick with a 14-inch screen size.
Laptop Notebooks Tablets News
Laptop Notebooks Tablets News
