Compaq Tablet PC TC1100 Battery |
Posted: September 23, 2017 |
Performance naturally depends on the components you choose. Even the basic model, with a Core i3-350M and 2GB of DDR3 RAM, will be perfectly powerful enough for the “holy trinity” of Word, Excel and PowerPoint – we’d expect it to score around 1.20 in our benchmarks. Our review model was souped up with a Core i7-620M and 4GB of RAM, putting it nominally on a par with the Lenovo ThinkPad T510. In practice, though, where the Lenovo managed a storming benchmark score of 1.91, the Latitude E5410 came in slightly lower with a score of 1.79.That may be partly down to the E5410’s more densely packed frame causing the Core i7 processor to run hotter and hence make more conservative use of Turbo Boost. But another factor is probably the GPU: while the Lenovo sports an ISV-certified Nvidia NVS 3100M GPU, the Dell is limited to Intel’s integrated HD Graphics. Thus, although our test system could be described as a workstation-class performer, it’s unsuitable for CAD work or heavy 3D visualisation. It’s also worth noting that the E5410 is supplied with only 32-bit Windows, so if you want to push the RAM beyond 4GB you’ll need to find and install your own 64-bit OS. Battery performance is another movable feast: you can save money with a 3,300mAh battery, or splash out an extra £65 exc VAT for a huge 7,700mAh unit. We tested the middle option, a six-cell 5,000m-Ah battery, which gave us 4hrs 14mins of light use.But perhaps what makes Dell’s business offering stand out more than anything is the range of ancillary services you can add on. Dell will optionally move data and applications from your old PC, place asset tags and anti-theft tracking devices on the new system, and undertake any subsequent data recovery and certified data destruction for you.The basic one-year carriage and return warranty can be upgraded all the way to a three-year, next-business-day on-site contract with insurance against accidental damage. Dell’s ProManage service even offers remote system monitoring and maintenance. It’s not cheap, of course: sign up for every service going and you’ll add more than £750 exc VAT to the cost of the system. But when you consider the cost of IT staff – and of lost productivity should disaster strike – it could still be an excellent deal for a small business.The Latitude E5410 won’t suit everyone in the office, but as a general-purpose business laptop, it’s hard to fault. Tough, functional and endlessly configurable, you could fill three-quarters of a business with various E5410 notebooks – ranging from the £629 exc VAT base system right up to the high-end model seen here – and hear no complaint. Away from the mains a removable 4,050mAh battery powers that modest specification. It isn’t the biggest we’ve seen – Asus’ Zenbook UX31E has a huge 6,800mAh capacity – but it’s still enough to keep the lightweight Core i3 CPU ticking over. It lasted 7hrs 25mins in our light-use test, while under heavy load that figure fell to 2hrs 33mins.We’ve baulked at some manufacturer’s attempts to mimic Apple’s buttonless touchpad, but Sony has made a good stab at it with the VAIO T13. The wide, squat multitouch surface is hinged at the top, allowing you to click the pad almost anywhere, and although light taps occasionally fail to register, it’s easy to get used to the amount of pressure required. The keyboard is good, too. There’s barely any travel to the keys, but they’re firm to the touch and make typing a pleasure.If there’s one major disappointment, it’s the 13.3in display. As with many of its peers, this Sony Ultrabook has a low resolution of 1,366 x 768, and there’s no getting away from the fact that it makes for a cramped Windows desktop.Image quality is also on the mediocre side. Admittedly, it’s no worse than most of its rivals, but with a maximum brightness of 188cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 214:1, it’s simply incapable of mustering the solid blacks and vibrant colours of a MacBook Air or a Samsung Series 9.It’s a shame Sony doesn’t offer any display upgrades, but the online configuration options provide welcome flexibility. First and foremost is the ability to upgrade to the latest Ivy Bridge processors. Add £100 to the price, and the Sandy Bridge Core i3 can be swapped for an Ivy Bridge-class Core i5-3317U CPU. A Core i7-3517U costs another £40 on top of that. Replacing the mechanical hard disk with an SSD is £120 for the 128GB, £140 for the 256GB and £900 for the 512MB. Thankfully, upgrading the system memory is more reasonable: going from 4GB to 8GB costs only £40.
Still, for around £300 less than its fancier peers this a usable Ultrabook, and even with an Ivy Bridge upgrade the price is lower than the competition. Screen quality remains disappointing, as it is with all the other low-end Ultrabooks, but if you’re craving a thin-and-light laptop on the cheap, the Sony VAIO T13 is the best of the current crop.Squeezing powerful components into an all-in-one PC isn’t always easy, but Dell has tackled the problem with a combination of low-power desktop and mobile parts. Low power doesn’t mean low performance, however – our review unit came with a 3.1GHz Core i7-3770S, which has a quad-core architecture, and is capable of boosting individual CPU cores right up to 3.9GHz.That nippy Core i7 CPU is backed by 8GB of RAM, and for storage there’s a 2TB HDD and a 32GB SSD caching drive. The result is a seriously quick all-in-one PC: with an overall score of 0.98 in our Real World Benchmarks, the XPS One 27 is as fast as many full-sized desktop PCs. In some areas, it’s even faster than our 3.4GHz Sandy Bridge reference PC; racing through the media-encoding segment of our benchmarks with an overall score of 1.08.Graphics performance is a little less impressive, however. Nvidia’s GeForce GT 640M is more commonly found on mid-range laptops, and it struggles to make the most of the 27in display’s massive resolution. It’s more than capable of cranking out smooth, playable frame rates at lower resolutions and reduced detail settings, but pushing our Crysis benchmark up to Full HD and High detail saw it struggle to an average of 26fps. Running games at the display’s native 2,560 x 1,440 resolution is too much for Nvidia’s mobile GPU, however; most modern games require the detail settings to be dialled right down. There’s very little missing elsewhere, though. There’s an HDMI input for connecting external devices, such as a games console or laptop, and an HDMI output for powering a secondary display. Two USB 3 ports are within easy reach on the XPS One 27’s left-hand edge, next to a pair of 3.5mm audio jacks for connecting headphones or a microphone, and at the rear there are another four USB 3 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and an optical S/PDIF output for routing the audio via a home-cinema receiver or hi-fi. Wireless connectivity is adequate: Bluetooth 4 is included as standard, but we’d rather see dual- than single-band Wi-Fi at this price.While Dell’s XPS One 27 impresses in many areas, we’ve one major criticism: we’re not convinced that Windows 8’s touch features are suited to such a large display. The Dell’s 2,560 x 1,440 panel is wasted on full-screen apps, and since gestures require a large amount of physical side-to-side movement on a 27in display, using the touchscreen for any length of time is tiring and unwieldy.In some circumstances, we can imagine it making a superb money-no-object media PC, with the giant touchscreen working well from a standing position, or for brief, casual use. For most people, however, spending £300 extra on the optional touchscreen is overkill. If it were our money, we’d pocket the difference and buy the non-touch £1,399 model, safe in the knowledge that we’d be getting the best Windows 8 all-in-one PC that money can currently buy. 18 February 2013 - Nokia's tablet won't be arriving at MWC, a researcher suggests, despite previous reports and images leaked from Pakistan last week. Strategy Analytics has called its sources in the channel and found no traces of a Nokia tablet, suggesting the Finnish firm intends to instead focus on its Lumia smartphone range at the Barcelona show, according to a report from Know Your Mobile.15 February 2013 - There's no innovation left to happen in smartphone hardware, one analyst has said, suggesting MWC will instead focus on software. "Industry commentators are wrong and are stuck in a pre-1981, pre-Microsoft 'hardware mindset'," said Victor Basta, managing director at Magister Advisors, according to ComputerWorld UK. "The mobile industry is no longer about the device.""The past few years have been about perfecting the mobile device. Smartphones are now derivative, innovation has already happened and Apple’s share price is suffering partly because of this," Basta added. "For 2013, all important mobile innovation will be software-based."
13 February 2013 - Opera has confirmed its switch to WebKit for its browsers, and the first release starring the rendering engine will arrive at Mobile World Congress in Android handsets. The Norwegian browser firm said it will unveil the new Android browser at the show at the end of the month.12 February 2013 - Nokia has long been rumoured to be working on a Windows tablet; there's been little hard evidence but the firm's CEO hasn't ruled it out, and it's an idea with some merit. Now, reports of a slide shown in Pakistan suggest that Nokia is already working a 7in tablet into its marketing materials - possibly ahead of a launch at MWC, notes TechCrunch.12 February 2013 - A British contingent of designers is heading to MWC, and Cnet will be showing off a selection of some of their best creations at the show. Highlights include a folding universal smartphone charger, a skin cancer-detecting app, and a tool that enables the display of a handset to be shown on an in-car dashboard - handy for satnav and playing videos for the kids.6 February 2013 - Android devices will surely cover much of MWC's show floor, but Google won't have a stand of its own, according to a French mobile site. Google told the site its representatives will still be at the show to "support" its partners; this move by the company suggests it won't be launching anything of its own at the show.5 February 2013 - Asus has already said it has "huge" plans for MWC this year, and the latest reports suggest these will include the successor to its Asus PadFone 2, which the company says has hit sales of two million, according to Tom's Hardware. Leaked photos also suggest Asus plans to unveil the Android-based MemoPad 10 tablet at the show. 1 February 2013 - Intel has revealed its plans for Mobile World Congress 2013, saying it will show off a new chip. "Specifically, Intel will showcase its latest smartphone technologies and devices running the Android platform, including a new dual-core, dual graphics platform, as well as OEM- and service provider-supported devices based on the company's new Intel Atom Z2420 platform targeted at emerging markets," the company said.30 January 2013 - According to a report from Know Your Mobile, ZTE looks likely to unveil a handset running Mozilla's Firefox Mobile OS. The Chinese handset maker is promoting its press conference with the hashtag "ZTEMozilla", and is known to be working with Telefonica on the platform.29 January 2013 - HTC isn't waiting for Mobile World Congress to kick off; instead, it's holding its own launch event days before the Barcelona show. HTC hasn't said what it plans to release on 15 February, but rumours suggest it will be the M7 smartphone – the follow-up to the HTC One X– which is expected to come with a top-end camera.29 January 2013 - Leaked photos have revealed two highly anticipated Samsung tablets, the Galaxy Tab 3 and Galaxy Note 8.0. Both are expected to be revealed at MWC in February.The former is expected to be a 7in device - possibly a budget tablet to target Google's Nexus 7. The latter is an extension of Samsung's successful Galaxy Note line, and is expected to come in 16GB or 32GB versions, although full specs haven't been revealed. 23 January 2013 - Firefox's mobile OS looks set to grab some attention at Mobile World Congress, with Telefonica Digital's CEO Matthew Key promising a "big announcement" at the Barcelona show.Telefonica already revealed it's working on a pair of developer phones, set to arrive in February - and likely to be on show at MWC. The handsets, developed with Spanish manufacturer Geeksphone, are the 1GHz, 3.5in display Keon, and the dual-core, 1.2GHz, 4.3in Peak.21 January 2013 - Samsung's mobile president JK Shin has revealed the company plans to unveil an 8in version of its successful Galaxy Note "phablet" at Mobile World Congress.Shin didn't share any further details of the tablet or its specs, but it's intriguing to see Samsung push the Note firmly out of the phone category and target similar-sized devices such as the iPad mini, Google Nexus 7 and Samsung's own Galaxy 7.7 tablet.15 January 2013 - LG has reportedly halted production of its Nexus 4 smartphone ahead of launching new devices at MWC, according to International Business Times.The report suggested LG may already be working on a successor to the Google Nexus-branded smartphone, and said LG was expected to release more Nexus devices - possibly at the Barcelona show.
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