- Business laptop, the Dell Latitude 7490
with Active Steering Wifi, is it any good?
Today we give you a quick tour and review,
and tell you what I think.
Stay tuned.
(futuristic music)
All right before we get started,
if you don't know it, the Latitude Series has been around
for a really long time.
And I've been sort of hopping back onto
the business laptop bandwagon.
The 7490 is brand new
and it's a 14 inch business class laptop.
This is the kind of device that IT departments
buy like 10, 20, or 30 of them,
give them to their road warriors,
They're meant to last years, be rugged, but also reliable.
And that's what we get here.
Now the specs aren't go blow gonna lot of you away,
but I'm more interested in just using it.
Is it comfortable, how's it feel and all that.
The Dell finish here with the 7490 is pretty familiar.
It is jet black, pretty matte,
doesn't pick up fingerprints too much either.
And it has a nice soft touch paint to it,
which feels really good, nice Dell logo on top.
Overall it is a solid feeling device,
it weighs 3.1 pounds or 1.4 kilograms,
so it's not super light, but it's also definitely not heavy.
I just really like how solid it is,
there's no creaking to it.
It's just the kind of device you want to throw in your bag
and not have to worry about babying it at all.
Turn to the right hand side,
you can see I have a lock port,
as well as a full RJ45,
which I always appreciate having this on a 14 inch laptop,
kinda nice to have.
You do have USB 3.1, microSD,
you have a slot for your Micro SIM,
which is really, this tray is hard to get out.
But let's be honest,
you're not gonna be swapping it too often anyway.
But yes, you can get a full modem with this
built in as an option, which is kinda cool.
You have a headphone jack as well.
Come around to the other side,
you do have a barrel plug for the AC adaptor
that is included the box.
If you don't wanna use that however,
you do have USB Type-C 3.1 that does do power delivery
and display out, and you can supposedly configure that too,
you can get full Thunderbolt 3 as well as an option.
Their configuration options on Dell's pretty confusing
but they do say that is available.
You also have HDMI 1.4,
and two more USB 3.0 jacks as well.
Turn it to the bottom here you can see
the nice intake grill for ventilation.
You also have a bunch of screws here which you can remove
and replace the components on the inside.
Standard screws, so pretty easy to remove the panel.
And turn to the front of the bottom of the device.
You do have your speakers.
Now this is gonna be a weak point in this device.
The audio is not very good.
Not surprising with Dell,
who are pretty hit and miss with their audio.
Obviously the positioning is not ideal,
and the sound is, well it's okay.
It gets the job done
but you don't buy this if you want outstanding audio.
Turn to the display options.
You have HD, yes I said that correctly, HD,
so that is below Full HD, which is what this one is.
It's 14 inch, 16x9 resolution, it is matte.
This one is non-touch,
but supposedly you can get it in a touch option as well.
Really nice display, though.
Now I know a lot of you guys want 2k and 4k displays,
but remember this is IT departments.
They've gotta save money, they have budgets.
So if you're gonna buy 10 of these,
you may wanna just get an HD display.
Dell also has a really low power option
that supposedly gets you around 20 hours of battery life.
Sure it doesn't look fantastic,
but for those of you really need good battery,
well that's gonna be your choice.
All right, turning to the keyboard here,
you have Dell's familiar Latitude design,
so this is a really good keyboard.
I love Dell's Latitude keyboards, it's one my favorite.
I kind of wish they'd use these the XPS line,
which aren't bad, but these just have a more springy,
and great travel on them.
I just really enjoy typing on this.
They also have a little bit of a divit in there,
so your fingers find it easy.
That blue accent color is kinda cool too.
You do have two-stage backlighting.
Overall, an excellent keyboard.
You also get their TrackPoint system here,
or pointer stick, or nav stick, whatever you wanna call it.
I know Lenovo's known for this,
but I actually prefer Dell's nav stick better.
Now I'm not even a nav stick user,
but I just really like the rubber dome on this
and how it feels.
You also have some clicky buttons here for that as well.
Turning to the trackpad,
pretty good design here, nice and smooth.
It is Precision drivers,
so as you know that's what I always prefer.
And you have buttons here for your right and left click.
Takes a little while to get used to that,
as the trackpad itself does not click,
but overall nice design.
Okay, let's talk a little bit
about the hardware configuration.
So you can get this in a Core i3, Core i5,
or Core i7 processor.
That is Intel 8th Generation, all quad cores.
And this one here is running the 8350, that's the i5 Series.
It's a very good processor.
I think it's best for most people.
That i7's obviously gonna be much more powerful.
For graphics, you're just gonna get Intel HD 620,
and there's no option for discreet graphics,
which i would have liked to have seen,
maybe them team up with AMD
to throw in something there as well.
But unfortunately, you're just going to use
the regular Intel.
For thermals, it's pretty good.
But this is the kind of system
where you're gonna hear that fan come on.
That fan can kick on and get a little noisy,
and does get a little warm on the bottom.
And that's kind of what the difference is
between here and like, the XPS line,
which is gonna use that GORE thermal material
to help keep down the temperatures.
But overall I don't really have any complaints about it.
It felt very nice to use.
When it comes to RAM, things are looking very good.
You get DDR4 as a built in options, four or a eight,
that's on a single DIMM, but there are two DIMMs on this,
you can throw in two eights and bump it up to 16 as well.
In fact you can get that on a higher tier model
which goes for around $2000.
For storage, you only get pretty basic systems here,
so you get 128, 256, or 512.
Now these are SATA SSD drives,
so in terms of SSD, these are pretty good.
They're not the NVME ones
that most people like to have,
and you find in the high end systems.
Now when it comes to battery life, there are two options.
It's gonna be a three cell or a six cell.
That latter is a 60 watt-hour battery,
so your battery life will range
anywhere between six and 10 hours easily on a single charge.
I really don't have any real complaints
with that six watt-hour battery,
and if you wanted to go further,
you can get that low power display and really push things.
All right, let's bring it all in.
14 inch business laptop, I like this one a lot.
Mostly because of the experience in using it.
When I open it up and start typing, I want to use it.
That, despite the fact the specs
aren't really that impressive.
Sure, you're getting a nice Core i5 processor,
up to a Core i7 8th Generation.
So that's really nice.
The display is Full HD, but I'm actually fine with this.
This is anti-glare,
it's a really nice display for what it is.
I'd like to see improved SSD speeds,
maybe some more Windows Hello options,
and a couple other tidbits,
but overall it's a really nice laptop.
Don't forget this is meant to last a long time
for IT departments.
And to keep those employees happy,
I think this gets the job done.
Now, if you want more information about this device,
you can just head to the description below.
We'll have the Buy links at Dell,
where can go check it out yourself.
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Thanks for watching, take care, everybody.