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It is not easy to stand out in the category of the best business laptops. Competitors such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and HP’s Elite Dragonfly have raised the bar, making it difficult for others to argue their case. But Dell proves that the Latitude 9410 2-in-1, a sleek and sturdy business notebook with unparalleled battery life, can handle the task. And today, we are here with our Dell Latitude 9410 Review.
It may not attract as much attention as the models mentioned above, but the all-aluminum chassis of the Latitude 9410 is thin and durable. Inside the enclosure are potent components, including a 10th generation Intel Core CPU capable of handling demanding tasks. And when you’re away from the clock, the Latitude 14-inch, 1080p display captures vibrant colors, although it could get a bit brighter.
But what makes the Dell Latitude 9410 2-in-1 a real competitor to the other best business laptops is its almost 17 hours of battery life, which distracts from some small pitfalls, such as high price and relatively heavyweight.
Specifications
Dell Latitude 9410 | |
---|---|
Price: | $2,494 |
CPU: | Intel Core i7-10610U (vPro) |
RAM: | 16GB |
Storage: | 512GB SSD |
Display: | 14-inch, 1080p |
GPU: | Intel UHD |
VRAM | N/A |
Battery life: | 16 hours and 50 minutes |
Size: | 12.6 x 7.9 x 0.6-inches |
Weight: | 3-pounds |
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Design
This isn’t the thick, boxy and boring Latitude I’ve grown accustomed to – it’s a sleek and stylish stunner. The Latitude 9410 is indebted to the Latitude 7400 2-in-1, the debut in what feels like a new era for Dell business. Following in the footsteps of the Latitude 9410, the Latitude 9410 leaves rectangular plastic for smooth metal surfaces and shiny chrome edges. It’s an upgrade from previous models, although the design is more restrained than other flashy models.
You’ll appreciate the updated Latitude 9410 2-in-1 as long as you keep it far away from the HP Elite Dragonfly, a competitive 2-in-1 with an enchanting royal blue chassis and a slim chassis that sits like a sports car. But not everyone wants to be seen in a top-down Lamborghini — a simple, unpretentious aesthetic does just fine in your office or a long-haul flight to a corporate conference. That’s where Latitude comes into play.
The brushed silver cover of this business notebook features a round chrome Dell logo that matches a pair of chrome hinges. Open the laptop, and you’ll see the same shimmering accents around the touchpad and the ports on each edge. My favorite design element is the thin edges around the screen. It’s a feature missing so many stuck business laptops.
Protecting the exterior of the Dell Latitude 9410 is a durable frame made of sturdy materials. Although I can’t do my drop test, the MIL-STD-810G rating assigned to the Latitude is proof of its robustness. That strange acronym means that the laptop can withstand harsh environments, after 17 rigorous tests, from exposure to extreme heights to undergoing blowing sand and dust.
For such a portable laptop, the Latitude has a respectable range of ports. On the right side, there is a USB 3.2 Type-A input, a micro-SD card slot, and a SIM card slot next to a headphone jack and a lock. On the other side is a second USB 3.2 Type-A input (with shared power supply), an HDMI 2.0, and two Thunderbolt 3 connectors (one for charging). There is no Ethernet connection, but that’s to be expected on an as thin laptop (you can always use a USB to Ethernet dongle if needed).
At 12.6 x 7.9 x 0.6 inches and 3 pounds, the Dell Latitude 9410 is as thin as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (0.6-inches, 2.4-pounds) and the Elite Dragonfly (0.6-inches, 2.5-pounds), but the Dell is considerably more substantial.
Keyboard and TouchPad
Most people will find the Latitude 9410 keyboard comfortable for writing long reports or editing spreadsheets. The backlit keys are well-spaced, so my fingers feel at home from the moment I started typing on them — no learning curve required. Those with larger hands will appreciate the spacing, but the small keys are not ideal for my muscular, sausage fingers. Dell enlarged the keys on the XPS 15 and XPS 13 by extending the keyboard across the deck.
I wish Dell had done the same with the Latitude. And while I’m at it, an on/off button on the webcam at the mute button would have been helpful. Still, the typing experience is excellent, as the Chiclet-style keys are snappy and travel quite a distance before they are triggered. There is a satisfying weight to the keys that reminds me of the heroic keyboards on Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops.
I was not in a hurry to connect a mouse because the Latitude 9410’s 4.1 x 2.4 touchpad responded quickly to my swipes and Windows 10 gestures, such as pinch-to-zoom. The glass coating is smooth and soft, the ideal surface to wipe your fingers for hours.
The Latitude 9410 also supports an $85 Wacom stylus (sold separately). Dell was kind enough to send us a Premium Active Pen, which has 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, a 240Hz refresh rate, and tilt support along with Wacom AES 2.0 technology. It’s a good stylus that kept track of my swipes when I made a drawing in Paint 3D.
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Display
On the Latitude 9410, a single display option is available: a 14-inch, 1080p touchscreen with an anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating. It’s not the brightest window,l but videos I watched looked sharp, and the colors were vibrant. The panel captured a lot of details in the trailer for Bill & Ted Face The Music. During the prison scene, I was able to read an “Elizabeth + Billie Forever” tattoo on one of the convict’s six-pack.
The colors were vibrant and accurate, but they didn’t jump off the screen; the electricity running through the famous phone booth was a fiery orange. But, it could have radiated more if the screen had become brighter. The touch screen responded quickly to my swipes and taps. I try to avoid using the on-screen keyboard; however, punching URLs with my fingers was not too frustrating thanks to the sensitive screen of the Latitude. I also want to emphasize the anti-glare coating of the screen, because it works well to block reflections, but still has that satisfying glossy look.
We placed a colorimeter on the screen and measured 111% of the sRGB color gamut. This makes the screen of the Latitude 9410 more colorful than that of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (101%) but less vivid than that of the Elite Dragonfly (117%) and the category average (121%).
At a peak brightness of 287 nits, the screen of the Latitude 9410 is not very bright. We expect at least 300 nits from a premium laptop so that the Latitude won’t hold well in this area. For further evidence, it was surpassed by the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (364 nits), the HP Elite Dragonfly (373 nits), and the laptop category average (368 nits).
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Audio
The dual stereo speakers on the Dell Latitude 9410 sound surprisingly good when you consider that they are located at the bottom of the laptop. Brandon Flower’s vocals were evident when I played The Killers’ “My Own Soul’s Warning” at 100% volume. The drum hits were missing, but the guitars were nicely separated. But those rapid drum beats and rising electric riffs had trouble filling my living room, and there was some scratchy distortion in certain trebles at peak volume levels.
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Graphics
Until Intel Tiger Lake releases CPUs, the integrated graphics in the chips will lag behind the discrete options of Nvidia and AMD. The Latitude 9410’s UHD graphics struggled with our gaming benchmarks and played Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm at a paltry 11fps (frames per second). Not only does it miss our 30fps playability threshold, but it can’t even match the category average (23fps). We drove around the corner in Dirt 3 at a constant 38 fps, which is playable but nowhere near the 65 fps average.
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Performance
Armed with an Intel’s Core i7-10610U CPU and 16GB RAM, the Latitude 9410 has lightened my demanding workload in the real world. I opened 40 tabs on the Chrome browser and loaded my favorite websites. The Latitude came through without any delay. There was no noticeable delay even when I played four 1080p Full-HD YouTube videos and a Twitch stream.
As expected, the Dell Latitude 9410 did well in our synthetic benchmarks, with a score of 16,849 on the Geekbench 4.1 overall performance test. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (16,958, Core i7-10610U) scored similarly while the HP Elite Dragonfly (14,114, Intel Core i7-8665U) and the premium laptop category average (16,521), lagged with its older 8th Gen CPU.
The Latitude also did an excellent job on the more demanding Geekbench 5.0 test, with a range of 3,780. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3,913) took the win in this round, but the Dell did the Elite Dragonfly (3,101) at the top.
Those synthetic scores translated to our real-world test where the Dell Latitude 9410 took 19 minutes and 9 seconds to convert a 4K (ultra-HD) video to 1080p (Full-HD) resolution. It completed the task moments for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (19:51) and crushed the HP Elite Dragonfly (22:23). The category average (18:43) is faster than all three.
The 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Class-35 SSD within the Latitude 9410, took just 5 seconds to duplicate 4.97GB of multimedia files, representing a transfer rate of 1,017.8 megabytes per second. The 256GB of SSD in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was equally fast (997.9MBps), and both laptops crushed the Elite Dragonfly (424.1MBps) and the average (696.5MBps).
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Battery Life
Hail to the new battery king. The Latitude 9410 lasted longer on a single charge than any other laptop we’ve ever tested with a record-breaking 16 hours and 50 minutes of battery life. Our battery test involves surfing the web continuously over Wi-Fi with 150 nits of brightness, so your results may vary. Either way, the Latitude 9410 stays powered during your workday without plugging in. And when it does turn off, the upgraded 90-watt charger brings the battery up to 80% in just one hour.
Rival notebooks offer fierce competition, but even the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (10:45) and Elite Dragonfly (12:25), two laptops whose endurance we’ve praised, were powered hours before the Latitude 9410.
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Heat
The bottom of this business notebook gets a little toasty under a heavy workload. After we played a 15-inch, full-HD video, the bottom area reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 10 degrees hotter than our 95-degree comfort threshold. And while the touchpad remained cool (84 degrees), the keyboard’s lukewarm keys (95 degrees) kept the blood flowing into our fingertips.
Price and Configuration Options
Like most other business laptops, the Dell Latitude 9410 is highly customizable. For the lowest price, the basic version of $1,569 comes with a 1080p display, an Intel Core i5-10210U CPU, 8GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD. Upgrading to a model with an Intel’s Core i7-10610U CPU (with vPro), 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD increases the price to $2,339. Our rating unit, which has a Core i7-10610U CPU (with vPro), 16 GB RAM, and a 512 GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Class 35 SSD, costs $2,494.
If you want the biggest, worst specifications, you can spend $3,799 on a top-of-the-range model with a Core i7-10810U CPU, 16GB RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
Dell Latitude 9410 Review: Conclusion
Dell’s Latitude 9410 2-in-1 is one of the best business laptops whose few shortcomings are offset by a few notable features. The Latitude 9410 has a lot to offer, but the definite highlight is the nearly 17 hours of battery life. That battery life makes it the longest laptop we’ve ever tested. And it delivers such impressive battery life despite having a relatively slim aluminum chassis tested for military durability.
What’s more, you get a strong performance from its 10th generation Intel CPUs and a good, albeit dim 14-inch, 1080p panel. As you can see, the Dell Latitude 9410 nails the critical things, yet it doesn’t skimp on extra features like the IR camera and the fingerprint sensor and stylus support. I wish it had a webcam cover for the privacy-conscious consumer, but that’s a small complaint.
If you need a durable business notebook, the Dell Latitude 9410 is an excellent candidate. However, lightweight competitors like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and the HP Elite Dragonfly are a lot more portable, so road warriors and frequent flyers should think about that.