Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Design and key features
- Compact 13.4in chassis
- Lightweight yet sturdy
- Only two USB-C ports
Leave the laptop closed, and you might not spot too many differences between this and last year’s Dell XPS 13, and that’s no bad thing. It’s about as handsome as screwed-together panels of CNC-machined aluminium get: crisp lines and chamfered edges soften into tight curves and the chassis tapers gently from a sliver over 15mm at the rear to just shy of 13mm at the front.
You can pick between two colour options: Graphite or Platinum and both look rather handsome. My review sample came in the Platinum finish, and its pale silver exterior and off-white interior looked great, even if the keyboard and touchpad did tend to look a bit grubby after a few weeks of use. If I was buying, I’d lean towards the Graphite model. The darker metal exterior looks a tad more classy and, more practically, the grey interior shouldn’t show up grubby fingerprints as readily.
At 1.19kg, the Dell XPS 13 is hardly a heavyweight, but build quality subjectively feels great. Grasp the base with both hands and twist violently and you’re likely to hurt your fingers before you get more than a millimetre or two of twist. The lid feels taut and sturdy, although it could perhaps be more so – after several weeks of regular use I noticed a slight line forming on the display from where the display was regularly pressing on the keyboard’s raised edge.
Scout around the XPS 13’s edges and you might reasonably wonder if someone at the factory forgot something. At first glance, it appears as if there are only two USB-C ports, one on each flank. Unfortunately, though, that’s not an oversight. There is no hidden bounty of ports secreted behind a flap; two USB-C ports is all you get.
Looking on the bright side, both USB-C ports are of the USB 4 variety so you get power delivery, DisplayPort 2.1 and 40Gbits/sec of bandwidth to play with. However, you’ll need to share them between external devices and the supplied 65W power supply. Granted, the visual symmetry is nice, but it’s restrictive – unlike the XPS 13 Plus, there’s not even a USB-A adapter in the box, for heaven’s sake. I took to carrying about a little USB-C dock for the duration of testing, and prospective buyers will need to do the same.
Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam
- Middling keyboard
- Average touchpad
- Mediocre webcam
I’ll start with the bad news and work back towards the middling. The touchbar is by far the most egregious example of form over function here, and – let’s not beat around the bush here – I hate it. For some reason, Dell has decided to replace the top row of function keys with a backlit touch-sensitive strip. It’s not a fancy OLED display or anything groundbreaking, it’s just some LEDs behind a plastic panel. Hold the Fn key and press escape and you can toggle between defaulting to function keys or the volume and transport buttons.
There’s no haptic feedback and there’s no way of finding any of the ‘keys’ by touch alone. It’s ill-thought-out at best – not least as there’s no way to adjust the timeout of the backlight. With no backlight, you can’t see the buttons. But when you don’t want the buttons glaring at you, when watching a movie in a dark room for instance, you just have to sit there and wait for them to turn off. Touch anything and they’re back on again for a few minutes. Brilliant design this is not.
The keyboard itself is okay – it’s backlit, too, although here you do at least have the option to turn it off. Again, I appreciate the aesthetic appeal of zero lattice keyboards, not to mention appreciate the logic that big keys should improve accuracy, but I found myself making more typos during my time with the XPS. The lack of a lattice separating the keys means that it’s just that bit harder to find your way around by touch alone. There’s nothing wrong with the key action, there’s no unwelcome squish and most of the keys are a decent size – except the silly shrunken up and down cursor keys; which, it has to be said, are annoyingly commonplace on laptops these days.
Another annoying aspect of the keyboard, however, is that Dell has squeezed a combined power button and fingerprint reader alongside the backspace key. If you’re one of those people who are prone to unthinkingly bashing the top right of your keyboard while editing text, then you can look forward to accidentally turning off your laptop every time you miss your target. My advice is to toggle the power button to Do Nothing and save yourself the inevitable interactions between face and palm.
If you’re looking at the photos and wondering whether I forgot to mention that a touchpad is an optional extra, then fear not: it has disappeared behind the panel of silky-feeling Gorilla Glass which stretches all the way across the wristrest. Before you get too excited, though: no, the touchpad doesn’t stretch the full width of the laptop. The touch area spans from the left-hand edge of the space bar to the right-hand edge of the Alt Gr key and there’s about 8mm of dead zone between the space bar and the touchpad and, again, about 8mm of dead zone underneath. It’s a normally proportioned haptic touchpad, but invisible.
As it should be, the touchpad isn’t something you’ll think about too often: it (mostly) works. It’s responsive for everyday cursor pushing and multi-fingered gestures alike and you can adjust the strength of the haptic feedback within Windows, although I preferred it at its default settings.
However, it was less reliable in more relaxed settings. When I was sat on a sofa, or lying down with the laptop propped on my lap, I encountered more than a few accidental long clicks; so much so, that I occasionally found myself flinging random text selections up and down my Google Docs as I was trying to work out what was happening.
The touchpad also occasionally got stuck with a phantom touch when it resumed from sleep, so the touchpad behaved as if I was clicking and dragging with a second finger. A torrent of expletives and a flurry of finger swipes eventually seemed to unstick it, but it’s a disappointing flaw – and one that’s been noted by other tech reviewers, too. (Hi, Tim!)
If you find it hard to get excited about webcams, the XPS 13’s is not going to change anything. The resolution tops out at 1080P and the framerate at 30fps; the image quality is decidedly mediocre, however. Detail is smeared, it blows out highlights far too eagerly and colours are vibrant but noticeably oversaturated, with skintones in particular looking unhealthily rosy. There is a second infrared camera for Windows Hello sign-in, though, which is good to see.
