As the devices in our pockets have become capable of doing more, larger portable devices have been struggling to stay relevant. The tablet was easily cannibalised by the smaller smartphone, and even powerful laptops are now finding it hard to justify their existence. Like ageing movie stars, they need to up their game, or perish.
Manufacturers are trying different approaches to keep larger portable workstations in the limelight. Some have started to focus on Chromebooks, marrying the practicality of the laptop form factor with the convenience of smartphone applications. Others are updating their entire line-up to focus on customers with particular use cases.
Dell seems to fall in the latter. The company has updated its bread-and-butter Inspiron 15 models with snazzier looks and serious gaming chops to cater to the last bastion of laptop users — backpack-toting, RPG-playing college-goers. With the smaller 13-inch models, the focus is more on productivity on the go. How well does this approach work for the small Inspirons, as Chromebooks and Microsoft’s Surface line-up take up arms against it?
With its 13.3-inch, 1080p touchscreen display, and a 360-degree hinge that allows it to be used in multiple orientations, the Inspiron 13 7373 2-in-1 is available with Intel’s 8th-generation Core i5 and i7 chips. We tried out the higher-spec i7 variant.
Let’s talk looks
On the design front, the Inspiron is a looker. Unlike the bigger, gaming-focused brother with red accents, this one is business-like, blending grey tones that look equally at home on your couch or the boardroom table.
The left side of the laptop features a 3.5mm headphone jack, USB Type-A and Type-C ports, a full-size HDMI port and a charging port. The right side gets another full-size USB port and a card reader. Dell is banking on your office or favourite café having WiFi, as there is no Ethernet jack on this one.
Special Arrangement
Fit and finish is good, the keyboard, which has a white backlight and a couple of illumination levels, is sturdy and does not really flex. It also offers enough key travel to make typing relatively comfortable over long durations. The trackpad is large and responsive, so you could do without an external keyboard-and-mouse combo. If you do get one, choose a wireless set to avoid using up all the ports on offer.
The screen on the Inspiron offers good colour reproduction and minimal shift when viewed at an angle. It is an IPS screen, and therefore, gets decently bright, but thankfully the brightness levels scale well enough to offer comfortable viewing, depending on ambient light.
On the inside
Powering the Inspiron is an 8th-generation Core i7 8550U processor. Unlike some of the previous generation i7 notebook chips, this one is quad-core and Turbo Boost is supported up to 4 GHz, which means this little Inspiron has comparatively good number-crunching power for a device this size, should you need to perform resource-intensive tasks.
With 16GB DDR4 RAM and upto 512GB SSD storage backing it up, performance is not lacking here, and we experienced no problems in daily usage. The laptop runs Windows 10 and gets an Infrared camera to help with Windows Hello authentication. No fingerprint sensor here though.
Versatile performer
The ace up the Inspiron’s sleeve is the 360-degree hinge, which allows it to be used in normal laptop mode, in tent or stand mode, or flipped over entirely into tablet mode. The presence of a touchscreen, and the fact that Windows is getting better at intuitively switching to tablet mode and offering more tablet-focused functionality, means that this is less of a gimmick and more of an actual use case. Touch sensitivity is quite good, and watching movies in stand or tent mode and scrolling through web pages in tablet mode are a breeze.
Special Arrangement
Gamers will not find much to see here, as the graphics firepower is provided by the onboard Intel UHD 620. The battery is a 3-cell 38WHr unit, which offers good standby time and great longevity, while being used for daily productivity tasks, web browsing and streaming video, thanks to the power-efficient processor.
Bottom line
The Inspiron line-up is surviving the laptop apocalypse by evolving into a smarter, focused beast, and the effort has paid off. These are not Chromebook cheap, with the i5 version costing ₹76,290 and the i7 running up to ₹96,190. However, it does stack up well against competitors like the Lenovo Yoga 720, and offers very few downsides for the price it asks.
