Dell Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 (7373) - Review 2022

The Dell Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 (7373) is an attractive, reasonably priced convertible laptop. For $849.99 (as tested), it gives you a handsome aluminum chassis with an eighth-generation quad-cadre, instead of seventh-generation dual-core, Intel CPU. It has both a USB-C port and an HDMI port, so you don't have to fuss with adapters for the former if you want to connect an external monitor. Its xiii.three-inch screen is bright and colorful.

But there's one fatal flaw. The Inspiron 13 7373 has a relatively small 3-prison cell, 38WHr battery that won't let you lot stray too far from an Air-conditioning outlet. While its competitors easily deliver 8, 10, or more hours of battery life, we couldn't get the laptop to concluding more than four-and-a-half hours in our video playback rundown test, despite numerous attempts. That's the kind of stamina we look from a large gaming laptop nowadays; it's unacceptable from a thin-and-light machine. And the possibility of having to stay plugged in while in Tablet mode is a non-starter.

That'south a shame, because otherwise it would be a formidable arrangement. For instance, the Inspiron 13 7373 easily outshines its slightly cheaper, plastic-clad stablemate, the Dell Inspiron 13 5000 2-in-1 (5379) . It's a sleek organization that flips and folds smoothly through convertible laptops' familiar 4 modes, from Laptop to Tablet, with easel-style Stand and A-frame Tent modes in between. It'southward also sensibly priced, with our $849.99 base of operations model featuring an Intel Cadre i5-8250U processor, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB solid-country drive (SSD). Another 100 bucks steps you lot up to an Intel Core i7-8550U chip, while $1,149.99 gets you the Intel Core i7 with double the retentivity (16GB) and SSD storage (512GB).

A Few Ounces Overweight

At 3.2 pounds, the Inspiron 13 7373 is no brunt in a briefcase, though like all convertibles, it's a tad heavy for use equally a tablet. While information technology's lighter than the iii.56-pound Dell Inspiron 5379, however, it's not the lightest in its class—the xiii.3-inch Lenovo Yoga 720, our top pick, weighs 2.83 pounds and the HP Spectre x360 xiii weighs 2.89 pounds. At 0.61 past 12.2 by 8.5 inches (HWD), our test unit is almost a perfect match for the Lenovo Yoga 720 (0.half-dozen by 12.2 by 8.4 inches) and more compact than the 3.v-pound Acer Spin 5 (0.63 by 12.8 past 8.nine inches).

The Inspiron 13 7373 has an understated blueprint in silverish aluminum, with chrome accents, such as the Dell logo centered in the lid. There's no flex in the keyboard deck or if you grasp the screen corners, though the screen wobbles a fleck when tapped in Laptop or Stand fashion. The bezels around the brandish are thin, though not as vanishingly thin as those of Dell's XPS models. Unlike the XPS models, the webcam on the Inspiron 13 7373 is in its proper place to a higher place the screen; information technology not but captures fairly bright, non-grainy selfies, merely as well serves every bit a face-recognition camera for Windows Hi logins.

The aforementioned USB-C and HDMI ports are on the laptop'southward left side, along with a USB 3.1 Type-A port, audio jack, and the connector for the AC adapter. Another USB three.1 port joins an SD card slot and a Noble lock slot on the right side. Ii bottom-mounted speakers produce passable audio for Skype conferences and video viewing, though you lot'll likely desire a set of headphones for listening to music—our MP3s sounded flat or two-dimensional, admitting with no distortion when volume was cranked up to fill a room.

Covering All the Bases

Apartment is as well the word that comes to mind for the Inspiron thirteen 7373's backlit keyboard, which offers adequate tactile feedback, but non a lot of travel. It'south possible to become a crisp, snappy feel from a thin machine—we're thinking of the HP EliteBook x360 1020 G2, among others—just the Inspiron xiii 7373'southward keys just felt plasticky.

Dell earns points for arranging the cursor arrow keys in the right inverted T rather than a row, though they're doubled up with the Fn central for Home, Finish, Folio Up, and Page Down. The tiptop-row keys conveniently default to system functions, such as volume and brightness, rather than F1, F2, and so on. The touchpad has an oddly textured, non-slip feel, like very fine-grained sandpaper, but glided and tapped smoothly enough.

The display features total HD (ane,920-by-i,080) resolution, which is a skilful fit for its size, showing fine details without getting squinty. (The system arrived with Windows' zoom fix to 150 percent, which I felt made icons and the taskbar as well large, and so I dialed it dorsum to 125 pct.) Colors are vivid, and contrast is skilful. In-Plane Switching (IPS) engineering science enables broad viewing angles, though these are handicapped by reflections on the screen's glossy surface. Impact-screen operations are precise.

Higher up Average Performance—Almost

The Intel Core i5-8250U is a ane.6GHz quad-core processor that powers both the Inspiron xiii 7373 and the Dell Inspiron 5379. It helped the pair to splendid scores (iii,368 and three,156, respectively) in our PCMark 8 overall function performance test, but behind the 3,459 of the more costly Samsung Notebook nine Pen and its eighth-generation Core i7 CPU. The Acer Spin five (SP513-52N-58WW) landed between the two Dell models at 3,206.

The Editors' Choice Lenovo Yoga 720, with its 7th-gen Cadre i5 (current models have an eighth-gen scrap), was not far behind the Dell duo in PCMark, but the Dell models' quad-core muscle prevailed in our CPU-intensive Cinebench measurement and Handbrake video editing exercise—the 7373 completed the latter in less than half the fourth dimension of the Lenovo Yoga 720 (1:eighteen versus 2:44).

The Inspiron 13 7373 besides outclassed the field in our 3DMark, Sky, and Valley graphics tests, though all of these convertibles, with their integrated graphics, fell far short of laptops with game-worthy dedicated graphics. They're meant for solitaire and coincidental games, not the latest $60 titles.

Merely both the Inspiron 13 7373 and the Dell Inspiron 5379 fare poorly in our battery life test, where the Inspiron 13 7373'due south best result was a beggarly iv hours and 34 minutes. (We thought it might have been a quirk of our test unit, but our sis site Computer Shopper saw just four:23 from theirs.) Even the HP Spectre x360 13, its battery drained past a 4K display, managed over eight hours, while the Lenovo Yoga 720 lasted for 12 hours.

A Short-Term Solution

A 3-pound convertible isn't meant to exist nearly permanently plugged in as a vi- or 7-pound desktop replacement is. Information technology'due south meant to be taken on the road, on a plane, or on the couch in Tablet mode. Despite its elegant design, swift productivity and multimedia operation, and brilliant screen, the Dell Inspiron 13 7000 two-in-one's dismal battery sadly disqualifies it from most users' daily routines. With its lighter weight, superior keyboard, all-day battery life, and impeccable design for the same price, Lenovo's Yoga 720 remains our Editors' Choice for midprice convertibles.