Dell Latitude 7330 Ultralight Review

So you've decided you want a Dell Latitude 7330 business laptop? You're not done deciding: The 13.3-inch ultraportable is available as a 3-pound convertible or in three different clamshell models—one in reinforced carbon fiber that's 2.5 pounds; an aluminum touch-screen config that's 2.67 pounds; and the Latitude 7330 Ultralight seen here, which uses everything from magnesium alloy to a smaller battery to pare its weight down to 2.13 pounds. (There's also a Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme, which weighs 5.1 pounds and survives being dropped onto rocks during rainstorms, but we'll overlook it.) The Ultralight is an appealing grab-and-go travel companion, but it's not cheap (starts at $1,789; $2,276 as tested), and its tradeoffs make us suspect the carbon version would be a better buy.

Good Old-Fashioned 1080p 

The Latitude 7330 combines a 12th Generation Intel processor and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) display, which feels downright retro given the popularity of screens with taller 16:10 or 3:2 aspect ratios instead of the classic 16:9. The $1,789 base model has the carbon fiber chassis and a Core i5-1235U CPU as well as 16GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a dim 250-nit non-touch screen. Windows 11 Pro and Wi-Fi 6E are standard.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Our $2,276 Ultralight model stepped up to a Core i7-1265U (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads) with Intel's vPro IT management and deployment tech; a 512GB NVMe SSD; and a 400-nit non-touch IPS display. Opting for the lightest model dictates a three-cell, 41WHr battery in place of a four-cell, 58WHr pack and neither a fingerprint reader nor face recognition webcam, so you'll be typing passwords instead of skipping them with Windows Hello. 

The 2.13-pound magnesium Latitude measures 0.67 by 12.1 by 7.9 inches. Among recently reviewed competitors, the 13-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2 weighs the same and is 0.58 by 11.6 by 8.2 inches, and the 13.5-inch HP Elite Dragonfly G3 weighs 2.2 pounds and measures 0.64 by 11.7 by 8.7 inches. Dell's XPS 13 Plus is more compact at 0.6 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches but heavier at 2.77 pounds, although any of these ultraportables is supremely easy to toss into a bag or briefcase.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

It hasn't passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures as the ThinkPad and Dragonfly have, but the 7330 feels fairly sturdy, though there's some flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. It has a generic slab design with rounded corners and medium-thin screen bezels with a sliding webcam shutter in the top bezel. 

The XPS 13 Plus, the X1 Nano, and the Apple MacBook Air M2 limit their connectivity to USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports (the first doesn't even have a headphone jack), but the Latitude 7330 Ultralight does much better. A Thunderbolt 4 port joins an audio jack on the left side, but on the right you'll find not only a second Thunderbolt connector but an HDMI monitor port, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, and a security-cable locking notch.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Getting the Job Done 

Bottom-mounted speakers produce quite loud but harsh and hollow sound; there's no bass to speak of, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Supplied Dell Optimizer software helps remove background noise during conference calls, but there's no music- or movie-oriented audio setting or equalizer. The webcam has minimal 720p resolution but captures fairly well-lit and colorful images, albeit with some noise or static. 

Dell Optimizer can also increase network throughput by combining two connected networks, wired and wireless (with no Ethernet port, you'll need a USB adapter for the former). It also offers cool, optimized, quiet, and performance thermal modes—we first tried our benchmarks in optimized mode and discovered a big boost when we switched to performance—and can apply optimized settings for up to five favorite applications.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The display is quite bright with wide viewing angles and good contrast. Fine details are reasonably sharp, and white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, helped by a screen that tilts all the way back. Colors are clear and vivid, and (since it isn't a touch screen with a glass overlay) there's no glare or reflection on the screen surface. 

The backlit keyboard (two brightness levels) offers a sensible layout, but the cursor arrow keys are in an HP-style row—with half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right—instead of the correct inverted T. The up and down arrow keys also pair with the Fn key for Page Up and Page Down, though there are dedicated Home and End keys on the top row.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The typing feel isn't ideal, more wooden than snappy; the power button at top right felt chintzy and seemed to stick once or twice. A small, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and has a gentle, nearly silent click.

Testing the Latitude 7330 Ultralight: Clash of the Two-Pounders 

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the Latitude 7330 Ultralight against four abovementioned ultraportables—the Dell XPS 13 Plus, the Apple MacBook Air M2, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2, and the HP Elite Dragonfly G3. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Latitude led the way in PCMark 10's productivity test, though all four Windows laptops cleared the 4,000-point hurdle that indicates ample power for the likes of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It did pretty well in our CPU tests, beating the Dragonfly which has the same 15-watt Core i7 chip, and breezed through the Photoshop exercise though it flunked PCMark's storage measurement for no discernible reason. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Neither Intel's Iris Xe nor any other integrated graphics will satisfy anyone hoping to play the latest games or run workstation-class 3D or CGI apps. The 7330 landed at the back of a rather slow pack; it's okay for casual gaming or streaming media but not much more. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Latitude made it to the eight-hour mark in our battery rundown but conked out long before the HP and Apple ultraportables—its runtime wasn't terrible, but the larger battery of the carbon and aluminum models would be nice. Its full HD screen showed good brightness (exceeding its rated 400 nits) and color, though it was no match for the gorgeous displays of the MacBook Air and OLED XPS 13 Plus.

A Conservative Corporate Choice 

The Dell Latitude 7330 Ultralight is a capable ultraportable with a good array of ports, and it reminds us that an old-school 1080p display can still be quite nice in this age of different aspect ratios. But the Ultralight version gives up its siblings' bigger battery and conveniences like a fingerprint reader and face recognition webcam, and the 7330 generally lacks the panache of more stylish designs like the square-screened HP Dragonfly Elite G3 (which admittedly costs a few hundred dollars more). It'll appeal to IT managers, but it's not the most elegant option.