Dell Latitude 12-e7240 Pro Reviews

A stylish business Ultrabook, but its poor screen and cramped keyboard hold it back

It's pricey, but Dell's Latitude E7240 is about as good as it gets in the realm of 12.5-inch Ultrabooks.

The Dell Latitude E7240 Touch is a compact sub-3.5 pound business ultrabook with a 1080p touch screen and MIL-SPEC certification. It's a good choice if you have a team testing whether Windows 8 will work for your organization, but there are less expensive choices for run of the mill business users.

Other than price, there isn't much to dislike about the Latitude E7240 Touch. It's a solidly built business ultrabook with loads of ports, good battery life, and a great screen. And even price isn't too bad compared to the competition. True, a similarly configured Lenovo ThinkPad X240 currently costs a few hundred less than our configuration of the E7240. But at least as of this writing, Lenovo isn't offering a 1080p screen on that model, sticking instead with the lowest common denominator 1,366x768.So if you want touch and a high-resolution display (which is great to have for multitasking, let alone any image or video editing ambitions), you'll certainly have to pay a premium. And while the ThinkPad may cost a bit less, it comes with just a one-year standard warranty, while the Latitude is covered for three years. That, plus the year of malware protection afforded by Dell's Protected Workspace, is, we think, worth paying a bit extra for. It's even worth an Editors' Choice.

A compact business Ultrabook with oodles of power and connectivity – only the low-resolution display disappoints

Dell created a solid and decent business ultrabook with the Latitude E7240. It is light and delivers a good system performance. Several components can be replaced and it comes with many important business features including a docking port. But, is this sufficient? It is outrageously expensive. Many options cost extra and not all components of the test model are completely convincing. The image quality of the web cam is modest, the mass storage capacity of 128 GB is rather low, and the HD display has narrow viewing angles in the vertical direction, a low contrast and its calibration is poor ex factory. However, the good keyboard with built-in backlight, the nearly ideal interface layout, and the long warranty period of 36 months compensate this a little bit. It remains to be seen, whether this is sufficient to keep up with the Haswell models of the competitors soon to come.