Dell Latitude XT2 Review

by Kevin O'Brien

The Dell Latitude XT2 is a business-grade convertible notebook, offering multi-touch finger and digitized pen controls. With a slim and boxy chassis it might not look as cool as some consumer tablets, but it ends up being easier to carry and smaller to travel with. With a starting price of $1,929 it is easily one of the more expensive tablets on the market, but it does include some not-so-common features. Is the Dell Latitude XT2 worth the high price tag? Read our full review to find out.

Our Dell Latitude XT2 Specifications:

• Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 1.4GHz (800MHz FSB, 3MB L2 Cache)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Business (32-bit)
• 12.1" Premium WXGA (1280 x 800) LED-Backlight Display with Multi-touch
• Intel X4500MHD Integrated Graphics
• 3GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM (2GB + 1GB)
• 120GB Toshiba 1.8" 5400RPM HDD
• 8X CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive) through docking station
• Intel 5100AGN WiFi, Bluetooth, and 1Gb Ethernet
• 6-Cell 42WHr Battery
• Limited 3-year standard parts and labor warranty with on-site service
• Dimensions: 11.7 x 8.7 x 1.1"
• Weight: 3lbs 13.6oz
• Price as configured: $2,253

Build and Design
The Dell Latitude XT2 has a very professional, business-like appearance with sharp lines and edges, all dark-grey design, and even exposed screws. This notebook is definitely not targeted towards those looking for the next designer notebook. Instead, it is aimed squarely at those who just want to get down to business. The brushed metal surfaces are actually specially painted covers that give the look of metal but with the ease of maintenance that paint gives. The finish resists smudges and is much easier to wipe clean than most brushed metal exteriors. If it was painted matte black and had a Lenovo logo printed on it, you would swear it was a ThinkPad.

I personally love the side profile of the Latitude XT2, which is almost perfectly square at all corners. It has no sloped surfaces, no rounded sides, and sits very low to the desk surface. If you are carrying the tablet around in one arm it takes up such a small amount of space that you really don't mind holding.

Build quality is excellent, and probably the best construction I have ever seen on a Dell notebook. Panels feel solid with very little creaking or squeaking plastic, and fit and finish is impeccable. Surfaces meet with clean lines and nothing feels out of place. Paint quality is great on every part of the body, with no specs of dust, unpainted edges, or really any type of imperfection. The screen hinge is durable and rugged, giving you the sense that it should hold up well over time. The chassis feels very rugged with barely a hint of flex if you squeeze the palmrest or put heavy pressure on the keyboard. The screen lid has some minor wiggle, but doesn't show any signs of color distortion unless you really try to twist the panel

Access to user-serviceable components is easy through two areas. The hard drive is located underneath the battery, with four screws and a frame holding it in place. The RAM, WiFi-card, and WWAN-card are located under a single access panel held in with two screws. For most upgrade needs it should take no more than five minutes to swap out any component. One interesting component that Dell puts front and center under the access panel is a user removable BIOS chip (with a handy pull tab). This lets companies replace it in the event of a failed BIOS update, instead of sending the entire machine in for repair.

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Screen and Speakers
The 12.1" screen on the Dell Latitude XT2 looks great and is one of the better tablet screens I have seen in person. With the multiple layers that tablets need over the actual display panel, most look hazy or cloudy compared to a standard notebook screen. The 1280 x 800 display on the XT2 looks slightly off compared to a normal display, but much nicer than the average tablet screen. One important feature of a tablet or slate screen is wide viewing angles for using the screen from multiple positions without having lots of color distortion. The display on the XT2 is above average in terms of viewing angles, but still suffers from some distortion viewing the screen in landscape mode and pushing the screen back. With the notebook in a slate configuration Dell makes it difficult to view the screen in that flipped position, since it wouldn't be very useful. In other positions the viewing angles are very good, with very little color shift at steeper angles.

Backlight levels on this screen are about average with other business notebook, but not as good as "sunlight readable" displays. Dell does offer a brighter panel for daylight use, which should hopefully be bright enough to not be washed out in direct sunlight.

The Dell XT2 includes a capacitive touch-screen with a built-in digitizer for pen input. The pen gives excellent traction and feedback on the screen, which I describe as sliding a ball-point pen over a glossy hard cover book. The texture allows precise movement, and it stays consistent across the entire screen. Oils from my fingers touching the screen didn't seem to affect the pen traction too much, although for the best writing surface possible I would suggest taking a microfiber cloth to the screen first. The pen includes two side-mounted buttons for second mouse click and erase functions. I found them to both work well but the second mouse button is slightly too sensitive ... activating with a slight touch.

The multi-touch capabilities of the XT2 seemed laggy compared to the pen input and took very deliberate strokes to get the computer to recognize the movement. On an Apple notebook the multi-touch features work immediately and work in a very fluid manner. On the XT2 they felt jerky and were delayed. If you lifted your fingers up from a scrolling motion, and started to scroll again, it might lag for a second before it moved again. The zoom features were just as bad, causing you to zoom in or out to the max accidentally. Overall, I think it is a limitation of the software and driver support, which might improve with Windows 7.

The audio system on the XT2 consists of a single mono speaker located on the left side of the chassis. It worked well enough for listening to the occasional song or movie, but being so far off to one side it sounded really off-center. Peak volume was pretty loud, but it also distorted when it tried to produce bass or midrange audio. Headphones are a must.

Keyboard and Touchpad
The XT2 keyboard looks and feels great, with slim keys and high visibility labeling. The layout is easy to follow, with full-size primary keys and appropriately sized function keys. Compared to other notebooks the keys have a shallower throw, which is a side effect of the thin chassis. I actually found the keyboard to be quicker to type on, since the shorter throw means less travel before a key activates. The individual keys have no wiggle when you try to move the top of the key side to side moving across the keyboard.

The touchpad is an ALPS model running proprietary Dell software. Compared to the average Snypatics model it did have show some minor lag, but still felt responsive and easy to use. I think Dell could have gone with a larger touchpad surface, since the XT2 has enough space to incorporate it, moving the buttons more towards the lower edge of the palmrest. Dell also includes a pointing stick, which worked, but didn't feel as fluid or responsive as other alternatives I have used.

Ports and Features
Port selection is excellent, even when compared to larger notebooks. The Latitude XT2 offers two USB ports, one eSATA/USB combo, audio in/out, FireWire, VGA, LAN, and a proprietary power socket for some Dell accessories. If you need more ports or an optical drive, the docking station gives you four USB ports, serial, DVI, VGA, LAN, headphone out, and of course an optical drive. The docking station feels extremely well built, and has one of the nicest latching mechanisms I have seen. It has a sturdy metal latch arm, which when extended and released has a delayed motion where everything slowly clicks into place.

Front: Lower edge of battery

Rear: AC Power, VGA, LAN, one USB + power jack, tablet controls on display lid

Left: Pen holder, one USB, FireWire, speaker

Right: Wireless On/Off, Wifi Catcher, USB/eSATA combo, SD-card slot, ExpressCard/54, headphone/mic, Kensington lock slot

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Performance
The Dell Latitude XT2 performed well in our tests, but seemed to be held back by slow hard drive transfer speeds. The XT2 uses one of the newer 1.8" 5400rpm Toshiba drives, but this didn't improve anything over other 1.8" drives we have seen in the past. I think this is the perfect situation where a SSD would provide a huge boost in performance over a standard hard drive. For everyday use the system seemed up to the task and didn't show too many signs of slowing down. Even when decoding 720P and 1080P video the XT2 worked without a problem. The main areas where it came into play were installing large applications or moving/copying files around, where the main drive ended up being the bottleneck instead of the interface or external drive. 3D gaming was out of the question with the integrated graphics and power efficient SU9400 1.4GHz processor, outside of game like Peggle or Bejeweled.

wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):

Notebook / CPU	wPrime 32M time
Lenovo ThinkPad X200 (Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40GHz)	32.119 seconds
Dell Latitude XT2 (Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 @ 1.4GHz)	55.663 seconds
Sony VAIO TZ (Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.2GHz)	76.240 seconds
HP Pavilion dv2 (AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 @ 1.6GHz)	103.521 seconds
ASUS Eee PC 1000HE (Intel Atom N280 @ 1.66GHz)	114.749 seconds
Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom @ 1.60GHz)	125.812 seconds
Lenovo IdeaPad S10 (2009) (Intel Atom @ 1.60GHz)	126.406 seconds

PCMark05 measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):

Notebook	PCMark05 Score
Lenovo ThinkPad X200 (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, Intel X4500)	4,298 PCMarks
Dell Latitude XT2 (1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400, Intel X4500MHD)	3,098 PCMarks
Sony VAIO TZ (1.20GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600, Intel GMA 950)	2,446 PCMarks
HP Pavilion dv2 (1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo, ATI Radeon HD 3410 512MB)	2,191 PCMarks
ASUS N10 (1.60GHz Intel Atom, NVIDIA 9300M 256MB)	1,851 PCMarks
Toshiba Portege R500 (1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600, Intel GMA 950)	1,839 PCMarks
Acer Aspire One (1.60GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950)	1,555 PCMarks
ASUS Eee PC 1000HE (1.66GHz Intel Atom N280, Intel GMA 950)	1,535 PCMarks

3DMark06 graphics comparison results against notebooks @ 1280 x 800 resolution:

Notebook	3DMark06 Score
HP TouchSmart tx2 (2.4GHz Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86, ATI Radeon HD 3200)	1,685 3DMarks
HP Pavilion dv2 (1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo, ATI Radeon HD 3410 512MB)	1,355 3DMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet (Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz, GMA X4500)	921 3DMarks
Dell Latitude XT2 (1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400, Intel X4500MHD)	655 3DMarks
Apple MacBook Air (1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7500, Intel X3100)	502 3DMarks
Sony VAIO TZ (1.20GHz Core 2 Duo U7600, Intel GMA 950)	122 3DMarks

HDTune measuring hard drive performance:

Heat and Noise
Thermal performance of the XT2 was excellent, staying only mildly warm throughout most of our testing. While under a higher load during our benchmarking, system temperatures crept up slightly, but still stayed within very reasonable levels as shown below. Fan noise was minimal, and I can't actually recall the fan coming on once during the review. If it was on, it was spinning slow enough that it was barely moving any air. Overall Dell did a very good job cooling the internals of the XT2.

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Battery Life
The Latitude XT2 didn't give as impressive battery life as I had hoped. Dell aimed for a clean flush mount design, which also has a hard drive mounted in the middle of the battery cavity. This only allows for a 42Wh battery, less than other business-class tablets. With the screen brightness set to 70%, wireless active, and Vista set to the Balanced power profile, the Latitude XT2 managed 3 hours and 24 minutes before it shut down. Dell also offers a 45Wh slice battery, which should in theory more than double the battery life.

Conclusion
The Dell Latitude XT2 packs some of the latest touch technologies in an extremely well built and good looking chassis. Build quality is above and beyond even similar Latitude series notebooks, with a very rugged chassis. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and feels almost better than the legendary ThinkPad keyboard. System performance would get a significant boost with a faster drive since the 1.8" model gets an average transfer speed of 28MB/s while most SSDs of the same size would be above 100MB/s. Overall, if you are looking for a very portable tablet designed to hold up to the rigors of daily business use, the Dell Latitude XT2 is a clear winner. The only big downside to this model is the high price tag and lower battery life, but if you can live with those it is hard to find a superior model.

Pros:

• Excellent build quality
• Thin chassis and business-grade color scheme
• Very easy to upgrade and service

Cons:

• Slow hard drive
• High price
• Largest internal battery is only 42Wh

Related Articles:

• Dell Latitude XT Review

 

My girlfriend has this system and LOVES it. She really likes how thin and light it is in terms of taking it to class.

Nice review! Thanks Kevin.

+rep

 

Very easy until one needs to clean the cooling system. Appropriately for ultraportables, the CPU is not socketed, so no upgrade for that.

Is this a new trend in splitting the review through 4 pages? Makes it harder to get the overall picture IMO.

 

I never understood the appeal of using finger gestures to zoom. I would rather have buttons/icons (or a scale bar like Google Maps) mapped to proportional increments (25, 50%, etc) or logical increments (fill screen, fill width, etc). It does the job much faster and its easier.

On apps like photoshop, it only scales properly in increments of 12.5, 25, 50% and so on.. so, zooming with gestures gives you a zoom proportion that isnt ideal. eg. 27.7%.

 

Great Review
Kevin, Does it Lag much when you use it?
Do you feel the apsense of the Dedicated Graphics?

 

The only lag seemed to come from the slow hard drive. I am not sure dedicated graphics would have helped, and would have only hurt the battery power even more.

 

If it had an SSD and Windows 7, this thing would be one sweet machine (save for the awful audio).

Windows 7 supports multi-touch unlike Vista, so hopefully this tablet will shine with the new OS.

 

Great Review, I really like the way the XT2 looks, perhaps a bit more than the E6400.

 

The wPrime and PCMark05 scores of the HP tx2z with the 2.4GHz Turion are 39.4 seconds & 3488 PCMarks.
The XT2 is still kinda $teep. Just looked and w/ 4GB, 320GB HDD (agn, BT, etc.) the tx2z's under $950.
XT2's solid build, styling and skinny, but poorer performance, for double the price.

 

Am I the only one who doesn't like the new multi-page review format?

There doesn't seem to be enough information to justify splitting the review into 4 pages.

Unless this is a cynical move to quadruple the number of ad views, I'd suggest either reducing the number of pages (down to 1 would be ieal ) or using the extra space to increase the information density of each page - for example, the battery life section could be expanded to include results of comparable tablet notebooks.

On to the actual notebook itself - where does the extra slice battery go? It does seem a rather disappointing battery life, especially for a ULV CPU and no real power hogs other than the touchscreen. And at the asking price, I'm disappointed that a SSD is not standard (even a 64 or 80 GB SSD).

 

Whenever i read reviews, i hit the Discuss link, since it has the entire contents of the review and i might want to add a comment anyways. Save a few clicks... i use AdBlock so i wouldnt see ads anyways.

 

Multipage reviews are not my cup of tea either. Good suggestion on the battery table though, I will see if we can add something like that in. As others have said the multiple pages will be for the frontpage article only, not the forums.

 

I too resent the multi-page format. please bring back 1 page reviews

 

I know, getting a good shot of a screen is difficult but this wallpaper makes it even more difficult to get an idea of contrast and color reproduction (as helpful as the overexposure ).

 

I am a little confused by the pictures of the display.

Does the XT2 use a proper PVA or FFS panel like quality Lenovo/Fujitsu tablets or is it simply an above average quality TN panel (like a MBP or Sony)? My guess would be the latter as the colors seemed to invert when it was shifted a great deal on the vertical axis (my x200 Tablet display NEVER inverts, no matter the angle).

Further, those hard drive speeds seem brutal. I'm surprised Dell didn't send you a version with an SSD (there are plenty of great 1.8" models) as it probably would have made the machine feel far faster.

Also as a minor side point, it would seem more appropriate to include at least one other tablet in the performance comparison section.

 

It will fit under the tablet just like the docking station (but you can't use both at the same time) The battery will add another 45Whrs.

If you want to have a look, you can see the battery at about 2:50 (the video review is in german though): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zEy8FwiRx4

 

The Lenovo X200t uses an IPS panel, since I have seen people who have swapped that over to the regular notebook. The XT2 felt like a really nice TN panel on this model we reviewed, since it had broader than normal viewing angles, but still distorted near the fringe. An IPS display wouldnt do that.

The "faster" 1.8" hard disk was a bummer. I have been so used to super fast 1.8" SSDs recently (T400s for example) and getting something that pushes ~30MB/s is just painfully slow.

 

I wish they had foregone the "flush battery design" and put a larger wHr battery in the back, like the other E-series Latitudes.

I'm sure if they did this they could have fit stereo speakers(atleast as good as the E4300's speakers), and maybe a 2.5" drive.

Otherwise, I love my girlfriend's XT2.

 

Might as well go for the XT as it is like $600 refurbished on Ebay.

 

Kevin, in your opinion, how does the Dell Latitude XT2 compare to the HP tx2500z and what would justify the higher price of the XT2. As Occams Aftershave says, the performance of the XT2 is below that of the HP2500z but is twice the price. Since this is an Intel based lappy against an AMD lappy, this is quite surprising.

Graphics - HPtx2500z better (no surprise)
Performance - HP tx2500z better ( quite a shocker there - in a notebook at twice the price with an Intel chip in it, the XT2 should run circles around the tx2500z with an AMD chip in it)
Battery Life - XT2 - only slightly better (3 1/2 hours vs 3 hours - both on balanced mode) - again a surprise since Intel machines typically give a lot better battery life.

Is it the look and feel, the Dell brand and name for busines vs HP which is known more on the consumer side, oveall quality of the other components?

 

The HP is 50% heavier and also larger. The XT/XT2 has multitouch.

 

Thanks lixuelai,

I did notice the weight difference (forgot to mention it), but multitouch may be the main reason to pay hundreds of dollars more.

Also, does the XT have a better quality of screen in terms of picture quality. This also could be deciding factor for road warriors when they go to meet clients and want to show powerpoint presentations, etc.

 

The Dell is thinner, lighter, feels much better built. I also have to say that the screen on the Dell has less of the hazy look that many tablets get with the touch layer over the screen panel.

Do I think it is worth 1k+ over the tx2500z, maybe not, but it is a better machine. It also has a much more refined cooling system, whereas the HP seems to go heavy on the fans to handle cooling.

 

Thanks Kevin,

While the emphasis (at least for me), is on the CPU, GPU, memory and possibly the hard drive, we sometimes downplay the other components that also contribute to the price/quality of the notebook.

 

interesting, i always prefered the "slate style pc" but this is definitely worth a double take. and it is powerfull for its size too!

 

It'd have amazing battery life had Dell designed the chassis to fit a larger wHr battery (i.e same design as the E-series Latitudes). 42 wHr is just too small. And even with a ULV chip, it ain't much.

However, to squeeze that much out of such a small battery, it's quite impressive.

 

We have recently switched to a new image that will be used in all of our reviews going forward. Oddly enough we have been using this same image over on our printer site for color comparisons. Better color gamut test, lots of fine detail, and we will also offer it for download so readers can see what it is supposed to look like in person in case they want to do side by side comparisons.

Attached is one of the initial revisions of it (final is on a thumbdrive at work). Basically the only difference is it is a closer crop from the master image, which doesnt have part of the balloon structure showing in the top right portion of the picture.

 

it also makes quite a nice wallpaper!

 

Kevin -

Nice review. We have recently purchased two of these systems for a couple of C-Level execs at our company. The laptops are fantastic. We purchased the SSD drive option and performance with XP seems snappy.

We have encountered a problem, not with the laptop, but with the media base. So far we have tried 4 media bases and only one of them works correctly. When connected to external speakers, the other three media bases distort windows sounds (again this is Windows XP Pro) badly. Additionally there seems to be a problem with the system entering an unrecoverable hibernation state when on the "bad" media bases.

We first thought that something was damaging the media bases, a peripheral or the laptop itself; however, we have been very careful to only plug in power and speakers to the last two bases and testing with both laptops. Brand-new out of the box, only one of the 4 media bases works and it works with both XT2 laptops.

If you don't use a media base this is no big deal. If you are an IT department supporting C-Level execs that want and need a docking station/media base and want to keep your job you might consider a different tablet.

Hank

 

Any chance you could review how multitouch works in Windows 7? Not in terms of what functionality Windows 7 gives but you were saying multitouch on the XT2 seemed lagging.

From what I could find nTrig (the makers of the multitouch parts) has a new version of its hardware coming out sometime this year and debating if I should wait to get better multitouch performance or if there is no need to wait.

Thanks

 

Stupid question maybe, but I would like to know -- this tested model was just equipped with 1.8" drive (because of weight/heat, or something) or it can only take 1.8" size?

Thank you for your help. Cheers.

 

It can only take 1.8" drives.

 

are these 1.8" drives ones with standard sized sata connectors or micro sata connectors?

 

I'm just wondering how does the multi-touch screen work? Why is it that when I try to play a .avi and a .mov file the multi-touch does not work? What kind of file type would allow for the multi-touch screen feature to work?