Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1 Review

While Dell's Latitude line has always been synonymous with business laptops, the Latitude 9440 2-in-1 (starts at $1,919; $3,093.60 as tested) has some DNA from its consumer flagship. The new convertible sports a design more informed by the futuristic Dell XPS 13 Plus than its conservative corporate predecessor. It's both an upgrade and a glow-up, with new features, added controls, and a sturdy laptop design. We just wish the 2-in-1 aspects got a bit more attention, as the machine changes from elegant to awkward as soon as you fold back the screen for tablet mode.

Configuration Options Galore

Enterprise laptops like the Latitude series are rarely purchased off the shelf, with manufacturers selling a range of options for everything from processors and storage to connectivity and other external features. The 9440 2-in-1 is no exception. The base model sells for $1,919 and comes with a 13th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU, 16GB of memory, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel IPS touch screen. Our review unit steps up to a Core i7-1365U (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads), 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD and sells for $3,093.60.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Other options include up to 64GB of memory, as much as 2TB of storage, a fingerprint reader in the palm rest, 5G mobile broadband to occupy the SIM slot, and several battery and charger choices.

As a business machine, the Latitude is also available with a number of software options, ranging from the Microsoft 365 suite to Adobe Acrobat and a 12-month subscription to McAfee Business Protection. CPUs with Intel's vPro IT manageability tech are available on most configurations, as is a subscription to Dell Apex Managed Device Service, as well as another extended service option that includes next-day onsite support.

Slick Business Laptop, Tacked-On 2-in-1

Dell bills the Latitude 9440 2-in-1 as the “world’s smallest 14-inch commercial PC,” and while we didn't compare it to every possible rival a quick survey shows that its 0.64 by 12.2 by 8.5 inches are in fact more compact than the 14-inch HP EliteBook 840 G9 clamshell and the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2 convertible. The Dell even has a smaller footprint than the ultraportable Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11.

While it may be physically smaller, it's not lighter. At 3.4 pounds, the aluminum chassis is almost a pound heavier than the X1 Carbon. Nor is it the most comfortable 2-in-1 to hold in tablet mode: The tapered clamshell design leaves a lot of hard edges to contend with when you try to hold it, and the palm rest's sharp edge is even more uncomfortable when you're feeling it dig into the crook of your arm.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Ergonomics aside, the 2-in-1 design is more than functional. The 360-degree hinge makes it easy to flip between laptop and tablet modes, with presentation-friendly tent and kiosk modes in between. The screen's QHD resolution looks fantastic in any mode, and the IPS panel is just as bright and colorful in landscape and portrait modes, without any color shifting as you change your viewing angle. The touch sensitivity is excellent, and Dell's nearly bezel-free InfinityEdge design is easy to hold and grasp without accidentally triggering anything on the touch screen. And you'll find no reason to hesitate with using touch here—Dell has added anti-smudge and anti-glare coatings to the glass-covered display.

Overall, the look is superb, with a near-black graphite finish that will look at home in any work environment, and an unexpected toughness despite the slim design. Dell says the Latitude 9440 2-in-1 has passed MIL-STD 810H tests against travel hazards like shock and vibration; since it's not a rugged laptop I wouldn't try getting it wet or taking it into a dust storm, but it should survive bumps, bruises, and desk-height drops.

Touch Controls: Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

As mentioned, the 9440 borrows the “zero-lattice keyboard” design that debuted on last year's XPS 13 Plus, and while it's definitely different in look and feel to your average business laptop, I have to admit it's growing on me. Lit with mini LEDs to offer higher brightness without hurting battery life, the square keycaps sit flush with the surface of the deck, resulting in an elegant and slightly futuristic look. Unlike the XPS 13 Plus, however, the Latitude's keyboard doesn't span edge to edge but is flanked by a pair of slim stereo speakers.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The keyboard is top-notch. Dell has clearly paid attention to laptop keyboard critics: The design promotes simple typing with no learning curve, ample travel for each keystroke, and a generally comfortable experience. The only real complaint is the palm rest, whose hard edge will dig into your wrists if you aren't careful. I'm all for clean lines and sleek designs, but a slight softening of the edges would go a long way toward improving this convertible's comfort.

The massive touchpad stretches from the keyboard to the lip of the palm rest, without even a narrow strip framing it on either side. Called a Collaboration Touchpad, it offers haptic feedback along with four glowing LED icons that only show up during video calls. These glowing glyphs are quick-access controls for Zoom and other videoconferencing tools, letting you quickly screen share, chat, mute and unmute the microphone, and toggle webcam video.

(Credit: Dell)

The webcam in question combines full HD 1080p resolution with IR face recognition for Windows Hello secure logins and a built-in shutter to prevent snooping when you're not using it. Pressing F9 in everyday use or the touchpad control during a Zoom call triggers a physical shutter inside the top bezel. The cover has an easy-to-spot red color, so you know when the camera is offline. A white LED indicates that the webcam is active.

Any Port You Want…as Long as It's Thunderbolt

One aspect of the Latitude 9440 2-in-1 that's not heavy on features is its port selection, which consists of a trio of Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of common connectors like USB Type-A or HDMI. Each of the three USB-C connectors can handle the AC adapter cable or charge other devices with Power Delivery or accommodate a DisplayPort monitor dongle. If you need to use an older port type, you can always find docking stations and adapters, but it's a bit of a nuisance.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Considering how much Dell's XPS 13 Plus clearly influenced the new Latitude's design, I suppose we should be grateful for the 3.5mm audio jack on the laptop's right flank. The ultraportable jettisoned that vital connector on the assumption you'd use only Bluetooth headphones or speakers.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Speaking of Bluetooth, you get that and Wi-Fi 6E for wireless connectivity. If you roam where there's no Wi-Fi to be found, the abovementioned 5G mobile broadband is a $214 add-on when you configure your system.

Testing the Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1: Business-Ready Performance

For our benchmark charts, I've compared the Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1 with two other business convertibles, the HP Dragonfly Folio G3, and last year's model, the Dell Latitude 9430 2-in-1. I rounded out the charts with two leading ultraportables, the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro M2 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11. All these laptops earned high ratings, and most won Editors' Choice awards, so the competition is fierce. All are thin-and-light laptops with integrated graphics rather than discrete GPUs; 16GB of RAM seems to be the standard, but the new Latitude boasts 32GB, which should give it a multitasking boost.

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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs 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 workstation maker 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.

Intel's 13th Gen U-series processors have proven to be a mixed bag performance-wise. Compared to their 12th Generation predecessors, the performance gains are sometimes clear but other times nonexistent; sometimes this is down to the specifics of the build, with factors like chassis airflow playing a role. In any case, you shouldn't assume that a laptop with 13th Gen Intel silicon will always beat one with 12th Gen. Indeed, last year's Latitude 9430 2-in-1 edged this year's 9440 in our CPU benchmarks.

In more application-oriented rather than synthetic performance tests, however, the new Dell did fine, posting excellent scores in PCMark 10 and Photoshop. It's clearly a fine choice for everyday jobs like Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint and even for light media editing, if not quite up to the standard of the mighty M2 chip in the MacBook Pro.

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). 

For additional graphics insight, 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.

Integrated graphics are the name of the game when it comes to most convertibles and ultraportables, but you'll see a variety of results in our basic rendering tests even if they're all short of the dedicated GPUs of gaming laptops. Apple essentially built a powerful GPU into the M2 chip and crushed it in our GFXBench tests, while the Latitude 9440 2-in-1 will be fine for office work if not hardcore gaming or workstation-class CAD or CGI.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptop 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. 

To measure display performance, 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).

In our video rundown, the Latitude 9440 2-in-1 lasted an impressive 16-and-a-half hours, trailing the remarkable stamina of the MacBook Pro but handily beating the other Windows systems including its predecessor. That's a longer runtime than half of the systems in our best business laptops roundup and qualifies it for our list of laptops with the longest battery life.

The Dell's display quality is quite sufficient, too, a bit shy of mobile workstation or OLED color fidelity but more than rich and vivid enough for productivity work. Its brightness is also quite high, as one of the few laptops to advertise 500 nits of brightness and then exceed that number in testing.

Verdict: A Team Player, Not an MVP

We find plenty to like about the Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1 in laptop mode. The display is first-rate, delivering excellent color and brightness, and the keyboard is a huge win as well, with a frameless design and an enormous touchpad with one-touch Zoom controls. Its battery life is also near the top of our charts. But in tablet mode, the 9440 shows its faults, with a hard-edged palm rest and a bit of extra heft. Dell's simplified port selection is fine if you already have a collection of adapters or a docking station, but maddening if you just want to plug in an HDMI monitor. And except for battery life, the convertible fails to show a major performance boost from Intel's 13th Gen hardware versus the equivalent 12th Gen Core i7 chip we tested in the Latitude 9430 last year.

That's not enough to keep the Latitude from an excellent score, but it does keep it from Editors' Choice honors. Corporate buyers loyal to Dell will be perfectly satisfied, but we consider the HP Dragonfly Folio G3 a better premium 2-in-1 and the all-but-flawless Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon a better ultraportable.