Dell Latitude E7270 Review: A Subnotebook with Good Battery

Dell Latitude E7270: At First Glance

Before modern ultrabooks and convertible laptops became popular, 12-inch subnotebooks were the most portable business laptops. Even now, these subnotebooks still find their applicability in many environments.

For instance, since 2016, when Dell released the Latitude E7270, it seems to have remained Dell’s best feature-rich professionals’ notebook. However, other laptop manufacturers also continue to advance the features of their subnotebooks.

Therefore, you might be wondering if the Dell Latitude E7270 will outshine similar subnotebooks from other brands. To find out about that and more, come with me as I decipher this Dell laptop.

Dell Latitude E7270: Design, Dimension, and Weight

The Dell Latitude E7270 looks undeniably sleek and attractive. It has a metallic case which you may not notice quickly due to the finishing on the outside.

Speaking of the finishing, the metallic case is covered by a rubber-like surface with a smooth Jeans texture. Although this looks good, it may attract fingerprints.

As expected, this metallic case should be durable. In support of that, the Latitude E7270 has passed the MIL-STD-810G testing.

By implication, passing this test means that the laptop can survive conditions like extreme temperatures, falls, and bumps during travel. All in all, the laptop’s body is quite appreciable.

As for color, the laptop comes in black.

Moving on, the laptop’s lid has a Dell logo at the center which is darker than the lid itself. Meanwhile, the lid sits on two tough silver hinges, which look as if they are joined together from the back.

Due to the toughness of the hinges, you can not open the laptop’s lid with just one hand. As an advantage, the tough hinges make the display not wobble easily.

Despite the toughness, these hinges allow for opening the lid up to 180 degrees. In this case, you will be able to spread the laptop flat while using it on your bed.

When you open this laptop’s lid, you will see a 12.5-inch display which you can purchase in either an HD (1366 x 768 pixels) resolution or FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) resolution.

This implies that there are two options of display type for this laptop. Now, let me introduce the display’s features properly to you.

First, the HD resolution display uses an LCD screen with a magnesium alloy back and an anti-glare coating on the front. The anti-glare coating helps to prevent light reflection on the screen when you are under the sun.

Moreover, this display option uses a white LED (WLED) which can illuminate the screen up to a maximum brightness level of 200 nits. However, there is also another model of this laptop, which has a max brightness level of 300 nits.

In addition to the brightness level, the HD display option has a widescreen (16:9) aspect ratio. The widescreen aspect ratio is preferable to fullscreen because it allows you to view every aspect of a display content with no portion cropped off.

Having said so much about the first display option, let us now talk about the second display option.

Similar to the first option, the FHD resolution display is also illuminated by a white LED (WLED) and has a widescreen aspect ratio. However, its maximum brightness level is better – going up to 360 nits.

Another thing that differentiates this display option from the previous one is that it uses an LCD with a woven carbon fiber back. Meanwhile, the front is made of Corning Gorilla Glass NBT.

This Corning Gorilla glass makes the display more anti-fingerprint and scratch-resistant than ever before. Befittingly, it is on this display option of the Latitude E7270 that Dell chose to offer touchscreen functionality.

Moving on, the display of this laptop is framed by wide bezels on all four edges. Although the laptop’s case is metal, these bezels are plastic.

At the center of the top bezel, you will find a webcam. However, there is an option for either FHD or HD webcam.

The webcam produces sharp images with impressive color accuracy. As a matter of fact, when you take a photo of yourself using this webcam, you’ll be surprised to see all the details of your face show up.

That’s enough information about the top part of this laptop; let’s now proceed to the laptop’s base.

Down to the base, there is a chiclet-style keyboard with a small width just as the laptop itself is small. Despite the small keyboard size, the black keys and their white texts look quite attractive.

Speaking of the keys, they have concave surfaces with 1.6 mm of key travel. The 1.6 mm key travel (how deep they can press down) makes them spring back fast once you release your finger.

Even more impressive is the white keyboard backlight with an adjustable brightness level. This cool keyboard backlight gives the Dell Latitude E7270 a classic look at night.

Below the keyboard lies a 99.06 x 50.8 mm touchpad with light rubber coating and dedicated keys. Even though you may not get a satisfying gliding experience, the touchpad still supports multiple gestures.

Therefore, you can pinch to zoom and swipe three fingers away to show all open windows.

Now, below the palm rest are two openings for the laptop’s speakers – one on the left and one on the right side. The speakers can output vocals pretty well, but I cannot say the same for its bass output.

Therefore, if you are more interested in getting more bass, you might need to connect to an external speaker or use a headset.

Turning your attention away from the palm rest to the edges of the base, there you will see a lot of ports. On the right side, there is a universal audio jack, followed by an SD card reader, one USB 3.0 port, and a SIM port.

Appreciably, the USB 3.0 is a PowerShare USB. A PowerShare USB allows you to charge phones and tablets with your laptop even when the laptop is off.

Turning to the rear side, you will see an ethernet port and a charging port on the left and right hinges, respectively. In between the hinges, there is one HDMI port, a DisplayPort, and two USB 3.0 ports.

Moving to the right side, there is a security cable slot, and you may get an optional SmartCard reader. In addition to all these connection ports, wireless connectivity is supported on this laptop with Bluetooth 4.1 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac.

With these, you can connect your laptop to numerous Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled devices.

To round up this section, we shall now look at this laptop’s dimensions and weight.

About that, the Dell Latitude E7270 measures 310.5 x 215.1 x 18.8 mm (W x D x H) and weighs 1260 g. Because the laptop weighs less than 1814.4 g (4 pounds), we refer to it as a subnotebook or a netbook.

However, I will like to compare its dimension and weight to other subnotebooks. The first one I will consider is the Lenovo ThinkPad X260 which measures 305.5 x 208.5 x 20.3 mm (W x D x H) and weighs a minimum of 1340 g.

Thus, while the Latitude E7270 is wider, the ThinkPad X260 is both thicker and heavier.

In the same fashion, the Dell XPS 13 9370 is smaller but heavier than the Latitude E7270. The former measures 301.7 x 199.2 x 7.8 – 11.6 mm (W x D x H) and weighs 1270 g.

With all the features considered in this section, I, therefore, rate the Dell Latitude E7270 an eight out of ten.

Dell Latitude E7270: Processor (CPU) Performance

The Dell Latitude E7270 is marketed with a powerful CPU from the Intel Core family. Specifically, it can take up to Intel Core i7-6600U CPU.

This CPU has two cores and 4 MB of cache memory.

The CPU cores refer to several locations on the CPU where individual tasks can be processed. Thus, the more cores a CPU has, the more it can handle tasks efficiently.

Meanwhile, a cache is a small component of the CPU that stores data during program execution for faster accessibility.

Coupled with its multiple cores and cache, this CPU runs at an impressive base frequency of 2.60 GHz and a maximum frequency of 3.40 GHz.

No doubt, this CPU will run almost any software with ease. However, the model I’m reviewing has an Intel Core i5-6300U CPU.

To see how well the Intel Core i5 CPU can perform, let’s look at its Cinebench R15 test result from notebookcheck.net.

Cinebench R15 gives some difficult tasks to one or all the CPU cores and measures how fast it can take to finish the tasks.

Depending on how fast it was able to complete the tasks, a resultant value is assigned to the CPU. The higher this value is, the better the performance of the CPU.

That said, the Latitude E7270 got 124 points when only one core was used to run the test. Meanwhile, it got 311 points when all the CPU cores were in use.

In comparison, the HP EliteBook 820 G3 with the same CPU got a single-core score of 123 points and a multi-core score of 311 points.

With these results, we can see that the Latitude E7270 is faster than the EliteBook 820 G3 on a single-core. Meanwhile, their performance on a multi-core test is equal.

All things considered, I will rate the Dell Latitude E7270 an eight out of ten in this section.

Dell Latitude E7270: Memory (RAM) Performance

The Dell Latitude E7270 uses a DDR4 SDRAM with a frequency of 2133 MHz. The laptop has two RAM slots and comes with an 8 GB RAM stick on one of the slots.

However, it supports up to 16 GB of RAM. Therefore, you can easily upgrade the laptop’s RAM to its 16 GB max capacity using the second slot.

Meanwhile, the Latitude E7270 model I am reviewing here has 8 GB RAM, which should multitask efficiently. With this configuration, multiple tasks can be handled concurrently without any slowdown.

In fact, this laptop should be capable of opening up to 30 Chrome tabs simultaneously. In addition to the opened tabs, the laptop can still stream an HD video on YouTube without lagging.

At this point, let us look at the laptop’s results in a PCMark 8 benchmark test. In general, PCMark 8 evaluates the overall ability of a computer to handle everyday and office-related jobs.

As expected, a higher score on the test indicates better performance.

In this test, the Dell Latitude E7270 scored 4581 points. On the other hand, the Lenovo ThinkPad X260 recorded 4341 points, while the HP EliteBook 820 G3 got 4581 points.

Therefore, while having the same PCMark result as the HP EliteBook 820, the Dell Latitude E7270 outperformed the Lenovo ThinkPad X260.

Thus, I will still rate the Dell Latitude E7270 an eight out of ten in this section.

Dell Latitude E7270: Storage Options and Performance

The Dell Latitude E7270 comes with SSD storage. This storage is a self-encrypting drive (SED) with either SATA or NVMe PCIe interface.

Specifically, a storage drive with a PCIe interface offers faster data transfer speed and easier upgrades than one with a SATA interface.

For storage capacity, this laptop supports a maximum of 512 GB. Meanwhile, the storage drive on my review model is the conventional SATA SSD with 256 GB capacity.

In case this storage size is not enough for you, there is an SD 4.0 card reader on this laptop. Therefore, you can either utilize the card reader for storage expansion or upgrade the capacity of the primary storage itself.

To see how the SSD storage performs, I’ll highlight its CrystalDiskMark test result as carried out by notebookcheck.net.

For a brief explanation, this test measures the read and write speeds of a storage drive. For clarity, the read and write speeds are just how fast a storage drive can open or save files, respectively.

Thus, a higher read or write speed is an indication of better storage performance.

In the test, the Latitude E7270 gave a sequential read speed of 498.4 MB/s. It also gave a sequential write speed of 286.7 MB/s.

In comparison, ThinkPad X260 with 512 GB SSD gave a read speed of 499.6 MB/s and a write speed of 403 MB/s. It is very clear that the ThinkPad X260’s storage is leading with many gaps in the sequential write speed.

Nonetheless, I will rate the Dell Latitude E7270 a seven out of ten in this section.

Dell Latitude E7270 Graphics Card Performance

The Dell Latitude E7270 features an integrated Intel HD Graphics 520 GPU. This GPU has a base frequency of 300 MHz which you can boost to 1050 MHz.

Although the frequencies of this GPU are reasonably powerful, its integrated interface makes this laptop a non-gaming one. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot play some mid-range games at low settings on this laptop.

Speaking of which, this GPU should run smoothly with simple games like Traffic Motorbike or FarmVille 2 from Facebook Gameroom.

Now, let us look into this laptop’s 3DMark test result.

For clarity, 3DMark is a benchmark test that evaluates how well a computer can render 3D graphics. Therefore, achieving a high score on this test indicates better GPU performance.

In the test, the Latitude E7270 scored 5250 points. Meanwhile, the EliteBook 820 G3 scored 5164 points, and the ThinkPad X260 recorded 5321 points in the test.

Thus, it is quite clear that the Latitude E7270’s graphics performance is mediocre compared to its two competitors.

In light of that, I will rate it an eight out of ten in this section.

Dell Latitude E7270: Battery Life and Performance

The battery that comes with the Latitude E7270 can be a 3-cell, 37 WHr Prismatic cell battery or a 4-cell, 55 WHr polymer battery.

For clarity, prismatic cells resemble chewing gum packs or Smartphone batteries piled together. They occupy less space on a laptop than cylindrical cells.

However, instead of going for the 37 WHr Prismatic cell, I will advise you to go for the bigger 55 WHr cell. This is because the latter will give your laptop a longer working life before plugging it back.

Well, Dell didn’t mention how long these batteries last, but we should expect a decent battery life due to the specs.

Still, we will find out how long the battery last by considering this laptop’s performance in some battery tests. For this purpose of the test, we will use a model of this laptop with a 55 WHr battery.

This test involves surfing the internet using a WiFi connection until the laptop shuts down. During the test, the screen brightness was set to medium level (150 nits).

Impressively, the Latitude E7270 endured for 8 hours and 28 minutes before shutting down. In effect, this battery can take you for a whole working day without having to charge it.

Meanwhile, the Thinkpad X260 with 46 WHr (internal + external) battery ran for 8 hours and 21 minutes on the test. Also, the HP EliteBook 820 G3 with its 44 WHr cell lasted for 6 hours and 13 minutes in the web surfing test.

Thus, seeing that the Latitude E7270’s battery performance is leading the others, I will rate it a nine out of ten here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

So far, there has been a mixture of better and lesser performances by the Dell Latitude E7270 as I compared it to its rivals. Nevertheless, its nearly 8 and a half hours of battery life is quite remarkable.

Additionally, the option of having Windows 7, 8, 9, or 10 on this laptop is appreciable but not unusual. What makes the Dell Latitude E7270 even more alluring is the option of having the powerful Ubuntu Linux or its Chinese version – NeoKylin as the OS.

Therefore, if you are impressed with the things that I have said about the Dell Latitude E7270, don’t be scared to try it out.

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