Dell Inspiron 14R

Full Review

Dell continues to fine-tune its entry-level, value for money Inspiron series of laptops and the recently launched Dell Inspiron 14R 14-inch laptop is a step in the right direction. Based on Intel's "Arrandale" platform (Core i5 processor), the new Dell Inspiron 14R is not only designed better than the Dell Inspiron 14-1464 but also offers better performance, and comes with an ATI Radeon HD 5470 graphics card.

The Inspiron 14-1464, Inspiron 14z, and Dell Studio 15 Artist Edition sports a dropped central hinge design which may be better looking but the Inspiron 14R's hinge placement is much more functional and practical.

Design
Gone are the dull black boxes of the past --  do you remember the Inspiron 15 sold in 2009? -- instead the new Inspiron 14R brings a fresh perspective to Dell's age-old Inspiron series of laptops. The new Dell Inspiron 14R has a much refined, cleaner look and feel. Like the Dell Vostro V13, the Inspiron 14R has its screen hinges placed not exactly on the spine of the chassis (like traditional laptops do) but a little inside -- we like this design as it makes holding laptops by the spine easier when they're propped open. The Inspiron 14-1464, Inspiron 14z, and Dell Studio 15 Artist Edition sport a dropped central hinge design which may be better looking but the Inspiron 14R's hinge placement is much more functional and practical. The Inspiron 14R with a six-cell battery is nice and light, weighing 2.25-kg, which is great for a mainstream 14-inch laptop -- the MSI CX420's even lighter, though. It is nicely built, beautifully balanced, and isn't top heavy -- you can lift the closed screen lid with a single finger, not many laptops can boast of this.

The Dell Inspiron 14R sells with four choice of screen lid colors, our review unit had a black obsidian screen lid. Buy anything but the glossy black obsidian top, as the dark color easily magnifies fingerprints -- we recommend bright colors as they help mask smudges. The new Dell Inspiron 14R's build quality is at par with the Inspiron 14-1464, and it sports identical brushed metallic surface around the keyboard including the palmrest. We definitely like the Inspiron 14R's looks but we like its redesigned hinge even more.

Usability
The Dell Inspiron 14R comes with a 14-inch glossy LED-backlit screen with a 1366x768 resolution. The screen is bright enough and evenly lit, displays crisp text and is nice for watching a movie for a couple of hours. The Inspiron 14R's screen has very good horizontal viewing angles, similar to the Inspiron 1464. The 1.3MP webcam (and microphone) on the Inspiron 14R's screen bezel might not be as great as the 2MP webcam featured on the HP ProBook 4520s, but it's good enough for video chats over Skype.

The Inspiron 14R's keyboard is exactly identical to the one on the Inspiron 1464, and it's just as good. The keys are nice and closely packed and great to type on extensively without a single mishit. However, the most important change on the Inspiron 14R features in the form of its touchpad. The new touchpad is wider and has a refined surface compared to what you get on the Inspiron 1464. As a result, you have a wider touchpad area to play with on the Inspiron 14R and its finely textured surface significantly improves overall response. The touchpad can also be conveniently turned off by hitting a key next to F11 -- this comes in handy if you're in a typing frenzy and your palm accidentally hits the touchpad -- nice attention to detail.

Ports placement is a bit of a mixed bag on the Dell Inspiron 14R -- I liked its power-inlet port on the back spine, but why put a USB port there? Beats me.

Hardware Specs
The Dell Inspiron 14R has very good basic building blocks. It has an Intel Core i5-430M 2.27-GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM (clocked at 1333MHz), 500GB hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 5470 graphics card. Compared to the Dell Studio 14 Artist Edition, Inspiron 1564 and Inspiron 1464 we've reviewed, the Inspiron 14R has the best basic hardware configuration. It also comes with a couple of USB ports, DVD writer, HDMI, eSATA, audio ports, and multicard reader. The laptop supports wireless Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity standards. Dell bundles the Inspiron 14R with a 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, and also offers a year's free subscription to Dell DataSafe Online -- an online backup service.

Dell DataSafe Online comes as an installed app on the Inspiron 14R, allowing you to backup not only important data but also your favorite music, videos, and photos, to the cloud. From launching the app, creating an account to backing up your important folders and sharing them online, it's all very easy through DataSafe Online. And while your data is backed up online, it's encrypted and safe. The service is pretty useful, I just wish it was free for life.

It isn't all rosy, however, since there are minor gripes. Where the Dell Studio 14 Artist Edition and Inspiron 1464 have three USB ports, the new Inspiron 14R comes with only two dedicated USB ports -- the third USB port duals up as an eSATA port -- not the best area to cut down on. It also doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet, which comes with the Studio 14 Artist Edition.

Performance
The Dell Inspiron 14R performed admirably throughout our string of synthetic benchmarks. A WorldBench 6 score of 100 is extremely good for a laptop -- very few laptops manage to reach this score. Similarly, a PC Mark 05 score of 5884, 3D Mark 06 score of 4576, and a Cinebench score of 7683 is some of the highest we've seen on a laptop. This proves that both processor-intensive and memory-intensive tasks are very well taken care of by the Inspiron 14R's hardware. Apart from day-to-day use -- browsing the Web, watching videos, listening to music, etc. -- the laptop can also be used for video-graphics editing, and a bit of casual gaming -- FarCry 2 at 1024x768 and Medium settings was playable on the bundled ATI Radeon HD 5470 graphics card.

We also had a nice time watching some HD videos on the Dell Inspiron 14R -- both 720p and 1080p HD files played smoothly without any stutter. The audio-visual experience, especially while watching movies, on the Dell Inspiron 14R was pretty good -- quite close to what we saw on the Dell Studio 14 Artist Edition -- with nice audio from its onboard speakers situated under the chassis' front lip. If you're planning to buy a 14-inch all-purpose laptop for home use, you can't go wrong with the Dell Inspiron 14R.

If you have huge expectations from your laptop in terms of battery life, the Inspiron 14R doesn't exactly do a stellar job. Its six-cell battery lasted all of 1 hour 8 minutes in our synthetic tests, and 2 hours 40 minutes while browsing the Web over Wi-Fi. This is average, nothing great, and should be okay for the Inspiron 14R's targeted home use or a couple of hours' commute from office at best.

Bottom Line

We like the new Dell Inspiron 14R -- we really like its look and design, especially its spine and wider touchpad, and it performs admirably. Plus it's relatively light-weight for a 14-inch laptop. Between the Inspiron 1464 and Inspiron 14R, we recommend the newer, better Inspiron 14R. If you don't care much for the fancy screen lid, greater battery life, or features, and you just want the best performing laptop between the Inspiron 14-1464, Studio 14 Artist Edition, and Inspiron 14R, buy the Inspiron 14R.

Between this and the MSI CX420, go for the latter if you require a lighter laptop with better battery life -- however, the Dell Inspiron 14R beats it in terms of looks and performance. Our review sample of the Dell Inspiron 14R sells for Rs. 43,800, but you can customize and buy the one that suits your budget on Dell's website for as low as Rs. 30,400.

Note from Dell: For all online laptop purchases from Dell's website, add Rs. 900 (for delivery charge) to the suggested laptop price and that should be the final price you pay. Nothing more.