The Dell XPS 13 OLED is one of the best laptops I’ve ever reviewed.
Its jaw-dropping OLED screen makes it a great choice for Netflix fans and people who make their content.
But keep in mind that the battery life isn’t as long as most ultrabooks.
Introduction
Dell already had the best laptop on the market, but the Dell XPS 13 OLED, with its jaw-dropping OLED screen, raises the bar even higher.
By upgrading to an OLED screen, the laptop’s contrast, brightness, and colour accuracy have all been improved, making the picture quality much better.
If you watch something like Netflix on your laptop, you’ll notice the difference right away.
But Switch OLED sceptics might tell you that just adding an OLED screen seems like a small improvement on paper.
Unlike Nintendo’s portable, it’s hard to see how Dell could have made it any better.
The XPS 13 OLED has an 11th Gen Intel Core processor, a beautiful lightweight design, and a price (starting at £1249) that is surprisingly low when you look at the specs.
With the great addition of an OLED panel, Dell has increased its lead over the competition, even compared to the revolutionary MacBook Air M1.
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This is one of the best laptops ever made, but should you buy it?
Design
Since a few years ago, the Dell XPS 13 has set the standard for how a laptop should look.
The laptop looks stylish and has more room for the screen because the bezel is so thin.
The MacBook Air M1 and other laptops with thick bezels look terribly out of date next to it.
The carbon fibre interior deck has a pattern that gives the laptop a little more style.
This goes well with the silver aluminium casing, which you can see on both the lid and the edge where all the ports are. The Dell XPS 13 is more durable than the magnesium LG Gram 16 or the plastic Chromebooks because it is made of aluminium.
Still, the deck of the XPS 13 bends a little when you press down on the keyboard, so it isn’t perfect in this way.
Screen
The Dell XPS 13 OLED is different from the previous model because it has a new OLED screen.
The main benefit of an OLED screen is that each pixel can make its light, and the screen can turn off pixels one by one to make deep black levels look like they are there.
Compared to standard laptop screen technology, the contrast and colour coverage are better.
When I put my Razer Blade Stealth, which has a 1080p LCD screen, next to the Dell XPS 13, the difference was incredible.
Even though the first one doesn’t have a bad screen by any means, it was clear right away that the picture quality on the Dell was much better.
As I watched Netflix’s nature documentary “Our Planet,” I could see that the Dell XPS 13 had more natural colours and picked up more details, like the waves of the ocean and the amber sunlight peeking out from behind the rocks on the coast.
The Razer’s ocean and sky, on the other hand, didn’t have enough depth, so they were all the same pale blue and made the scene look washed out.
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Performance
You can get the Dell XPS 13 OLED with either an Intel Core i5-1135G7 or an Intel Core i7-1185G7 processor.
This is what Dell sent me.
These are the same chips that were in the XPS 13 before this one, so don’t expect a performance boost.
But since ultrabooks use Intel’s latest generation of mobile chips, there’s not much room for improvement unless Dell switches to AMD.
The performance is on par with that of other Windows ultrabooks, and it has some of the best benchmark scores I’ve seen this year for a 13-inch laptop.
This means that the Dell XPS 13 OLED can quickly handle work-related tasks and creative tasks like Photoshop and Premiere Pro.
Battery: Having a 3.5K resolution and an OLED screen is a big step up from a standard Full HD laptop, but the extra pixels cause a bigger power drain, so there is a trade-off.
In our PCMark 10 office battery test, which simulates everyday tasks until the battery dies, most modern laptops easily last longer than 10 hours.
In this test, however, the Dell XPS 13 OLED only lasted 7:22, which is one of the worst results I’ve seen in 2021.
That’s even worse than the 9 hours and 52 minutes that the 4K Dell XPS 13 (Tiger Lake) model from last year lasted in the same test.
This means that the OLED panel is making the battery last less long.
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Some devices with OLED technology have better battery life because black doesn’t need a backlight. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.
Even so, I think the 7 hours and 22 minutes of battery life is still just about good enough for a laptop.
It’s just short of being able to work a full day without being plugged in.
