Dell Latitude 7480 – A Smooth Portable Windows Experience

As a ‘Mac’ user for the last few years, I was interested to see whether a Windows Laptop could come close to my experience using a Macbook Pro, so when I received the Dell Latitude 7480 for review, I was eager to see if it could meet my expectations.

At first glance the Dell looked and felt very high quality, the aluminium of my existing laptop was replaced by a soft touch matt black finish. with e matt screen. I was pleased to see the keyboard was back lit which makes operation in dark areas much easier and it seems crammed with every kind of pointing device option I have ever seen!

The Dell was installed with Windows 10 and this ran up very quickly, ably assisted  by a 256GB SSD Drive which practically removes loading times, 8gb of memory and an incredibly fast Intel i7 processor. The colour production of the 14 inch screen was extremely impressive and the 1920 x 1080 resolution seemed plenty for the screen area.

The setup process was really simple, something I assume most Windows 10 PC’s now benefit from. The super fast drive and processor obviously help with this and I was up and running in a couple of minutes.

The laptop was very happy running on battery alone for significant amounts of time and even with fairly heavy use, lasted well. The charging connector is also lit in blue to make finding it in the dark very easy.

Connectivity wise, the Dell 7480 is packed with different sockets on each side of the device, with power socket, USB-C,  Thunderbolt 3, Full Sized HDMI, 3 x USB-3 , smart card reader, headphone jack, Simcard slot, Micro SD reader and Ethernet connector, plenty in fact to please any business person.

Along with the standard sized backlit keyboard, the laptop also had a mouse ‘stick’ in the centre of the keyboard, a touch pad and two sets of mouse buttons, 2 below the touch pad and 3 above just below the space bar. I found it quite surprising to find almost every iteration of navigation hardware on one laptop, but it was nice to have the options to choose from.

I spent quite a lot of time running fairly heavy duty software on the Dell Latitude 7480,  from Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe After Effects CC to Adobe Premiere CC and a couple of other video editors. Video editing is really processor and memory intensive, it requires the ability to copy and edit very large files. The Dell seemed to handle this will ease, I was able to plug in an external monitor via the HDMI port and edit large 4K video files without any noticeable lag.

The Latitude 7480 is aimed squarely at the business market and appeared to cope amiably with pretty much any task I threw at it.

As with Dell products, you can customise your order when purchasing from them. Prices start at £999, the model I tested out was in the region of £1360.

If you are looking for a very high performance laptop with excellent battery life and screen, you shouldn’t go far wrong with the 7480.

Matt Porter, The Gadget Man