Horizon widens with Dell's Latitude
You can swap batteries as well as plug-in devices in this tough tablet computer
Dell Latitude 10 is a 10.1-inch tablet computer designed to be tough and expandable. It performs quite well for a tablet computer and features a 10-finger capacitive touch screen using fast-refreshing IPS (In-plane switching) technology with 1,366x768-pixel resolution.
It is made of reinforced magnesium alloy frame, covered with a soft-touch material and its screen is protected by a seamless piece of Corning Gorilla Glass so you don’t have to worry about the scratches.
It is unprecedented for a tablet computer to have a removable battery, but Latitude 10 has one, so you can buy an optional battery. And if the tablet ever freezes, you can simply remove the battery to restart it.
It’s great that Latitude 10 has all the necessary ports. I love its full-size USB 2.0 port for connecting to a flash drive or an external portable hard drive without the need of an adapter. But the full-size USB port is apparently why the table is 10.5mm thick.
The tablet also provides a full-sized SD card reader, mini-HDMI port, and a Kensington lock port.
Apart from its AC adapter charter that connects to its dock port at the bottom, Latitude 10 also provides a micro USB port beside the dock port that you can use to recharge the tablet’s battery.
Latitude 10 is expandable with an optional productivity dock and you can also buy an optional Wacom active stylus for pinpoint accuracy when writing on the tablet.
Latitude 10 is powered by Intel Atom Dual Core Z2760 running at 1.8 GHz. It is equipped with 2 GB DDR2 800 MHz SDRAM and 64 GB Solid State Drive. The tablet runs on Windows 8 32-bit edition.
It uses Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 533 MHz for graphics processor, which shares the system memory for the video memory so the tablet cannot handle extensive graphics games but it can play casual games very well.
The test found that Latitude 10 has good performance for a tablet computer, which is mostly used for reading web pages, checking mails and updating social networks on the go. Its touch screen and menus were responsive and web pages were rendered fast. Music and audio files were played smoothly.
It took only about 12 seconds for the tablet to start up and it two less than two seconds to turn off the screen during shutdown but it took about 18 seconds to completely turn off the power, noticing from the power light at the power button.
Benchmarked by Windows 8’s internal benchmarking tool, Latitude 10 got about 3 points for most categories, which were good enough for a tablet as the benchmark tool is also used for notebook and desktop computers.
On the scale of 1.0 to 9.9, Latitude 10 got 3.4 points for the processor performance of calculations per second. It got a good score of 5.6 for the performance of disk data transfer rate.
It got 3.3 points for 3D business and gaming graphics performance and 3.7 points for Desktop graphics performance. For the performance of memory operations per second, it got 4.7 points.
The tablet has a good battery life of about 9 hours of usage.
Dell Latitude 10 has a suggested retail price of Bt23,000.
Key specs
_ OS: Windows 8 32-bit
_ Processor: Intel Atom Dual Core Z2760 1.8 GHz
_ Memory: 2GB DDR2 SDRAM (800MHz) integrated
_ Video Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (533MHz)
_ Display: 10.1-inch IPS (1366 X 768) Wide View Angle LCD, Corning Gorilla Glass, Capacitive 10 Finger Touch with Optional Wacom Active Stylus Support
_ Hard Drive: 64 GB SSD
_ Cameras: 2.0 Mpixel HD front facing video webcam and 8.0 Mpixel rear facing camera
_ Ports and slots: Full-size USB 2.0, Full-size SD memory card reader, docking connector, stereo headphone/ microphone combo jack
_ Connectivity: Wi-Fi
_ Dimension: 274mm x 176.6mm x 10.5mm
_ Weight: 649g
