Dell Pro Premium (Latitude) Review: A Frustrating Step Back from the ThinkPad X1 Carbon
After nearly six years of faithful service, my company-issued Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon suffered a terminal liquid spill. Due to recent university procurement policies restricting hardware purchases strictly to Dell, I transitioned to my new machine yesterday: a Dell Pro Premium (let’s call it what it actually is—a rebranded Latitude).
While the new laptop brings a couple of minor modern upgrades, as a tool for daily work, it feels like a significant downgrade in the areas that matter most.
1. Ergonomics & Typing Experience: A Complete Disaster
For a portable machine meant for long hours of writing and editing, the input experience is paramount. This is where the new Dell fails most severely.
- Flat, Unseparated Keys: The keycaps are completely flat with minimal spacing between them. Without tactile borders, my fingers constantly slide across keys, making it frustratingly difficult to locate key edges by feel.
- Swapped Ctrl and Fn Keys: Dell placed the Fn key where the Ctrl key should be on a standard layout. Every attempt to perform basic shortcuts like Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V triggers an Fn combination instead. Unlike ThinkPads—which allow you to easily swap these key functions in software or BIOS—Dell offers no straightforward way to fix this layout flaw.
- Mushy Key Travel & Poor Bottom-Out Feel: The ThinkPad keyboard provided distinct, crisp tactile detents at the end of each keystroke, giving clear feedback without requiring extra force. The Dell keyboard features shallow, mushy travel that lacks a firm bottom-out point, slowing down typing speed and causing unnecessary finger fatigue.
2. TrackPoint vs. Trackpad: Missing Efficiency
- The Loss of the TrackPoint: The absence of a center pointing stick (TrackPoint) is a huge blow to workflow efficiency. On the ThinkPad, editing text required moving a thumb and forefinger just a few millimeters to precise physical mouse buttons without ever lifting hands off the home row. Moving back to a trackpad-only layout introduces constant, unnecessary arm and wrist movement.
- Credit Where It’s Due: To the trackpad’s credit, it is surprisingly good. It is smooth, responsive to taps and gestures, and features solid physical push-down clicking mechanism—though it still can’t replace the speed of a dedicated pointing stick for heavy text editing.
3. Display, Performance, & Battery Life
- Display: The screen is visibly brighter and sharper than my older ThinkPad. It is a genuine improvement and one of the few highlights of the device.
- Performance: On paper, the RAM is faster. However, Intel’s newer processors in this class have moved away from traditional Hyper-Threading. As a result, multi-threaded CPU performance feels roughly equivalent to my four-year-old ThinkPad, making the generation gap feel like a wash in real-world everyday tasks.
- Battery Life: While I haven’t completed a full test cycle yet, the efficiency improvements of a newer platform should yield a couple of extra hours of battery life compared to my aging previous machine.
- Build: The device is noticeably heavier than the ultra-light X1 Carbon, making it feel slightly chunkier in a bag.
Final Verdict
A laptop’s primary job is to serve as an intuitive interface between the user and their work. While the Dell Pro Premium offers a decent display and a solid trackpad, it falls severely short on core input ergonomics. The combination of flat, mushy keys, a frustrating layout, and the lack of a pointing stick makes for a tedious typing experience.
If your workflow relies heavily on typing speed and precision editing, this machine is a frustrating compromise forced by IT policy rather than a true upgrade.
