Shortly after the touch-enabled model of Sony VAIO E14A was taken from us, Dell’s XPS 12 landed at our doorstep, again sent over by Intel, to show us how the second-generation Ultrabooks were coming along.
I didn’t really like last years’ XPS 13. The exhaust vent blew hot air on my lap, thermals were only just acceptable, the overall design was just a bit “meh”, it was overpriced and the installed bloatware didn’t help. There were also a few issues with the graphics drivers, Windows 7 was the only sane part.
Fast forward to 2013 and we have the XPS 12 that aims to be a hybrid between a notebook and laptop, and while I don’t think it deserves to be called an “ultra”-book, there’s no shorter name for it. Perhaps “hybrid” wouldn’t be a bad name either.
The XPS 12 can change state between a notebook and a heavy tablet via a frame that lets the screen swivel and flip, so that the back of the screen faces the keyboard in tablet mode. The screen itself is a 1080p glossy touch-screen display which uses Gorilla Glass.
The XPS 12 boasts about its carbon fibre build, and the edges are aluminum. The touchpad is much better than the previous XPS 13, though I preferred the VAIO’s Synaptics pad more. Gesture support is still a bit lacking with Windows 8, though it’s much better than what was present on Windows 7.
Before I move on to internals, I must discuss the tablet aspect, as it’s the entire point of the second-generation ultrabooks. I felt that the main two issues with XPS 12 as a tablet were: heated air being blown on to your legs or hands or some fabric surface (which would block the vents) through the inexplicably placed bottom vent; and the weight — 1.5 kg is quite heavy for a tablet and that kills the experience.
On the positive side, you can switch between portrait and landscape mode, and the interface is pretty responsive. The new Modern UI of Windows 8 is still a weird thing, and since the entire OS now has basically two incompatible souls, the overall usability of the tablet mode ends up being severely limited to things like light web browsing, using “Metro” apps, reading. pdf documents and consuming multimedia.
Internally, the model I received had a 17w, dual core, hyper threaded Core i7-3517U, 8GB of RAM (2x4GB) running at 1333 MHz at 9-9-9-24 latencies, so memory bandwidth was high. The 256 GB Samsung 830 Series SSD ensured stellar file system performance and the Intel HD4000 integrated GPU is adequate for what this machine is to be used for.
However, here’s where Dell loses the plot. In the US, the base XPS 12 model costs $1200, for almost the same specifications as Microsoft’s Surface Pro ($1100 with the keyboard). Assuming that the difference in price is justified by build materials, the $500 gap between the lowest and highest end models is not justifiable, as the difference in RAM, SSD capacity and processor comes to around $250, considering retail prices.
Given the price, and the entire experience, I would not be able to recommend XPS 12 to readers.