Dell Latitude 10: laptop replacement tablet

    The story about the Dell Latitude 10 tablet is worth starting with the purchase history. In early December, I flew to Austin, Texas on Dell World. This is such a great annual event, where Michael Dell performs with associates, as well as friendly celebrities. In 2012, these were Bill Clinton (the same one) and Linkin Park, and Mike Shinoda, a friend of many, demonstrated how he mixes songs directly on the touch screen of the Dell All-in-One.

    During the break, a young man approached me, who turned out to be a reader of my texts with considerable experience. He used to live in Turkmenistan, and now in Austin. Works at Dell, misses home, but doesn’t tear back. After discussing the intricacies of writing interesting articles, the young man winked conspiratorially and offered to buy the latest 10-inch tablet. Say, only 10 copies were allocated to all delegates, six have already dispersed, but one of the remaining four may become mine. The price of the issue is $ 650. At first, I admit, I reacted to the proposal with restraint. After all, a tablet on Windows 8 ( well, on RT) was already in the arsenal. And although Latitude 10 looked very nice, I didn’t want to spend money on another ... Everything was decided by a visit to the Dell website, where under the description of this model it read: “Estimated delivery date - January 19, 2013” ​​(recall, the calendar was the first decade of December). To be one of the first device owners in the world and certainly the first in Russia? What doubts can be, I take!

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    They wrote me down in a puffy notebook and promised to send an SMS when the tablets were brought to Austin. And indeed, a day later, in a corner of the Austin Convention Center, a branch of the Office Depot network opened briefly, where they sold me a huge box. Besides jokes, she was really huge by today's standards. Previously, these were with VCRs. Opening the box showed that I was lucky: they put a docking station and a branded cover in the load on the tablet itself. Both of them were packed in separate boxes made of brown cardboard, but even so, there was a lot of free space inside. It was filled with cellophane blisters. Against the background of the packaging of the iPad mini tablet, bought for one of my colleagues, this whole “composition” looked pretty monstrous. But if you've ever bought a ThinkPad series notebook, the box with the Latitude 10 doesn't scare you, because it is similar to that used by IBM / Lenovo, like two drops of water. There is nothing surprising in this: the tablet is intended for a business audience, and it will never show off on the shelves of ordinary stores. But from the point of view of practicality and preservation of the contents - the option is sensible.

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    The first meeting

    Having returned home, I wrote on the blog that I had acquired an interesting piece of iron, I was studying, and soon I would sit down for a review. And then an amazing thing happened. It turns out that in the world at that time there were a lot of people who placed an order for Latitude 10, but had not yet received their copy. My post was immediately translated into English, published in some forum, and citizens went to the blog with questions from the series “Well, why? How? Like? Does it get warm? ” etc. One Russian-speaking citizen even sent a detailed list of tests that, in his opinion, I was obligated to immediately launch on a tablet and report on the results.

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    Official portrait of Latitude 10

    Due to the high workload and the habit of studying experimental equipment deeply enough, I sat down for a review only a month after the purchase. During this time, I managed to get used to it properly, install the usual set of software and take the tablet to the master Levchenko for analysis. And now, I hope I can tell you something really useful.

    On the surface

    To begin with - about the iron component. The screen size of the Dell Latitude 10 is 10 inches with a resolution of 1366 × 768 pixels. An IPS-type matrix was used, so the color richness is excellent and the viewing angles are my respect. Gorilla Glass protects the silica glass from above. As a user, I am extremely pleased with the quality of the picture. But a stern businessman, carrying a lot of corporate secrets with him, wide viewing angles can do a disservice. Therefore, inveterate paranoiacs should take care of the sticker of a special film that protects the screen from prying eyes. Fortunately, such films are inexpensive and affordable everywhere.

    The screen, of course, is touch. Pressing ten fingers at the same time is recognized. There is support for the Wacom pen, but I did not have one in the collection, so I have not been able to verify this functionality, which is important for many, in practice. Those interested can buy a stylus for $ 49 and try.

    The system runs on an Intel Atom Z2760 processor with a peak frequency of 1.8 GHz. This is the only (so far) Intel chip made specifically for tablet computers. Two cores, four threads (thanks to Hyper-Threading), the volume of the second level cache is 1 megabyte, 64-bit instructions are not supported. The RAM is limited to 2 gigabytes, and it can work in dual channel mode. The graphics core operates at a frequency of 533 MHz, and the entire chip is made using 32-nanometer technology. The TDP value is not reported, but, looking a little ahead, I will say that it is very small.

    On-board flash memory is 64 GB. Unfortunately, 128-gigabyte and more versions of Latitude 10 are not yet available, and the memory is a single Sandisk chip soldered on the board, so there is no way to upgrade. This is partially compensated by the presence of a full-sized SDXC card slot on the tablet, thanks to which on-board memory can be easily and inexpensively doubled (recall, a 64 GB SD card now costs from 2000 rubles).

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    We list other useful holes. To the right of our hero is a full-sized USB 2.0 port, to which you can connect anything you want - an external drive, printer, hub, keyboard, mouse, etc. Also, smaller mobile devices can be recharged from it. Next door is a mini-HDMI port. Why I need to clarify I will not.

    A proprietary jack for the charger and dock was located below. Next to it there is also a micro-USB port, but why it is needed is not very clear. The site says that "for charging", but no matter how much I connected the chargers to it, the desired effect was not achieved. The tablet says that it sees the connection, but does not want to charge. Perhaps you need a more powerful source, but I can only offer a charger from the iPad 4 generation (12 watts).

    The Latitude case is made of magnesium alloy with a soft-touch soft touch coating. Weight along with a standard battery of 658 grams (iPad 4th generation, I recall, 652 grams). It is convenient to hold the tablet in your hands with one or two hands, and you don’t want to release it from the case again. Seriously, a very successful cover turned out. Dell does not recognize who its manufacturer is, but by indirect indications it is Belkin. I apologize for mentioning some kind of case on such a serious resource, but, aside from jokes, without it, using modern tablet PCs is almost impossible. And the right case adds +25 to karma and usability.

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    The main charm of a tablet on Windows 8 is the ability to connect anything from the periphery to it. In this case, it worked perfectly with the keyboard from the ancient iMac and a very rootless mouse.

    The tablet runs on a full-fledged, not cropped Windows 8 operating system. The default is “just eight,” but my reader said that there is the possibility of a free upgrade to Professional. True, when you try to "access additional functions" through the Control Panel, you receive a proposal to bring in at the cash desk 2190 rubles first. You can probably get an upgrade by contacting Dell support, so far I see no good reason to bother with this. Personally, I'm on a tablet and without Professional is good.

    Although - how good? Everything I wrote about Windows RT, easily ported to the full version. Two interfaces, poorly glued together; the inability to normally control the computer with your finger in the Desktop mode - all this is there. But there is no problem with the software. Run whatever your heart desires. You can install drivers, so I was finally able to set up my Xerox home printer on the tablet. Of course, on my large computers I left the “seven” and so far I’m not going anywhere with it. But on the tablet it is unsuitable for use, which means it will have to get used to Windows 8. It’s almost used to it myself - like a dog gets used to its fleas. But still I think that Microsoft did not specifically finish the idea that was essentially good.

    Now that we have walked along the exterior, it's time to look inside.

    What are tablets made of?

    The first thing that pleasantly surprises is a removable battery. Us and in laptops with ultrabooks such spoil less and less, and in the tablet in general I see for the first time. By default, a battery with a capacity of 30 Wh is supplied, but you can buy twice as much capacity. True, I personally will not do this, because even from a regular tablet in read mode and with background synchronizations via WiFi (mail, social networks) it works exactly 10 hours. In the Battery Eater test (Classic mode), where the battery rendered in OpenGL constantly rotates on the screen, the operating time was 5 hours 42 minutes. It is worth clarifying that in both cases there was a setting to turn off when a 15% charge level was reached, so that if necessary, you can squeeze another forty minutes to an hour or more.

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    In my usual “tablet” mode, when it is used in the evenings for an hour and a half, I charged Latitude once a week. Just like an iPad. Inside, by the way, it’s not ARM, which is considered the standard of energy efficiency, but the “terribly voracious” x86 architecture with large real Windows. I don’t know how it is with you, but after these measurements I broke the template into small pieces. By the way, the Standby mode of Atom Z2760 is about the same as that of future Haswell processors: it sleeps, it sleeps, but it performs basic tasks, such as checking mail and receiving messages in the built-in Windows 8 messenger.

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    The battery hides data on energy consumption, the country of manufacture (China, of course), and even the Rostest badge. The back cover is mounted on two bolts, but to remove it, you need to deal with a few tricky latches. However, an experienced master coped with them without difficulty.

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    As usual, the electronic part occupies a very small part of the internal space of the tablet. I used to have to look inside the tablets on the previous generation of Intel Atom, but their boards looked more like netbooks. The same components, the same fans. At Dell Latitude 10, the layout of the electronics is already completely "tablet". Perhaps the board lacks the grace inherent in counterparts in Apple tablets, but compared to previous Atom’s incarnations in tablets, this is a giant step forward.

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    All electronic filling of the tablet. Below are two cameras - the main (8 megapixels) and front (two megapixels). The main one with good lighting shoots very well, no worse than in the new iPad. The front panel starts to “make noise” even in a rather bright room, but it’s quite suitable for communicating via Skype.

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    The main board with the screens removed

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    It is a rear view

    In the photo the board may seem quite large, and to understand its true size look - how huge the SD- slot seems cards.

    We remove the protective screens, we are looking for the processor ... and we do not find it. How so? Where did he go?

    Unfortunately, we can’t admire him. The Intel Atom Z2760 is so small and generates so little heat that the board developers decided to resort to a two-layer design. Look carefully at this photograph taken through the eyepiece of the microscope.

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    Before us is Samsung K3PE0E000A-XGC2 - a two-channel 16-gigabit (or 2-gigabyte) LPDDR2 module (by the way, it is also used in the American version of the Samsung Galaxy III smartphone running on a Qualcomm chip). Have you considered? See CPU1 on the left? So the processor is hiding under the memory module.

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    The salad-colored edge at the bottom is the edge of the Atom board.

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    In this picture you can see that the design is not even two-layer, but three-layer - there was a place between the processor and the memory chip and the substrate.

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    The SD card seems just gigantic

    Interesting, right? Previously, I saw this only in mobile phones and smartphones, where engineers go to a variety of tricks, just to save space. I don’t know whether it was really critical to save it in this case, but the fact that the 2-core processor with the x86 architecture can not only not be equipped with a radiator, but also soldered under the RAM module, was easy to fit into my head. He really does not need cooling: for many hours at 100% load, the system withstood without hovering, and the back cover remained a little warm.

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    Hi, Mitsumi!

    We already talked about the 64-gigabyte Sandisk module, but the integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controller presented a little surprise. Probably, many experienced computer engineers remember the excellent and very inexpensive Mitsumi mice and keyboards. They lived for a long time and worked no worse than much more expensive counterparts. Then, this company also produced good optical drives, which, however, gained somewhat less popularity. For the past six years, I have not come across Mitsumi products at all, and I really thought that the brand remained in those days when computers were large. But no! The miniature controller in Dell Latitude 10 is made by Mitsumi and works very well. Supports Wi-Fi standards IEE802.11abgn and Bluetooth 4.0.

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    Here could be 3G

    My copy of the tablet is not trained to work with 3G, but if you wish, you can purchase a version with the appropriate module, which in the States will cost $ 100 more. A place for it is provided, but, alas, an independent upgrade is not possible. If you really want to, you can insert a regular USB-modem, since the energy supply is quite large. And here you want 3G, you want LTE - who needs what.

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    The board responsible for maintaining the proprietary interface connector looks rather complicated, but there is a reason. The fact is that when we connect to the docking station, we have at our disposal as many as four USB 2.0 ports (the processor does not support 3.0), full-size HDMI, and even Ethernet. It is assumed that you use the tablet as the main working computer by connecting a monitor, an external hard drive, a keyboard with a mouse to the docking station, and when necessary, take it with you and go on a business trip or just to meet.

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    Having removed all the electronics, we stopped. From the inside, the screen is mounted on plastic rivets and, in order to access it, it would seem that it would be necessary to peel off the glass under heating. We did not begin to risk the health of the tablet

    Docking stations can be two pieces - one in the office, the other at home. But is there enough performance margin for such a pretty usage model? I tried to figure this out, getting used to the role of an advanced businessman for a week.

    Theory is faced with practice

    The Windows Performance Index immediately tells us that the system can compete with notebooks running on Core 2 Duo. The lowest figure in the game graphics - well, there is nothing surprising. It’s really better not to run modern 3D games on a tablet, but a classic like Max Payne 2 just flies. There are also no problems with games from the Windows Market, since they are rather simple.

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    A little surprised by the high score on the built-in drive. According to the Speed ​​Test Pro benchmark, its maximum reading speed is pretty decent 77 MB / s, but the records are only 27.5 MB / s. By mobile standards, this, of course, is not bad, but by computer standards - so-so. And we remind you, we are trying to use Latitude 10 precisely as the Computer of the Business Man, as he intended.

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    Tablet in the dock. Front one USB port and headphone jack. Everything else on the back.

    The tablet works seamlessly with the Philips FullHD monitor. There was also no hassle with the Logitech Bluetooth mouse and the wired keyboard of the same brand. By the way, during the disassembly, we connected a keyboard from some ancient "Mac" to Latitude 10, and through the built-in USB hub, it also included a wireless mouse. And nothing worked fine.

    A normal person is not surprised at this, but after acquaintance with Microsoft Surface, tablet compatibility with any equipment, I am happy as a child. I experienced a very serious moral trauma when a card reader didn’t work with Surface ...

    The dual-core Atom has enough power to service the Microsoft Office 2010 package. He opened 100-megabyte presentations with rather complicated animations, wrote texts, rules and journal estimates in Excel. It feels like something like on my last laptop with a Core 2 Duo T6500 (2.1 GHz frequency). That is quite fast.

    In the background, windows with Facebook, Twitter, Lenta.ru (before the redesign) and a couple of random sites were constantly open. At first, they do not cause trouble, but, as we know, the pages of social networks have a habit of slowly wiping out memory until they take up the entire available amount. So, Facebook in IE easily reached 700 MB, after which it became difficult to work and had to reload the page. However, this is not the fault of the tablet, but of wonderful programmers with fun accents.

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    These are not boomerangs. These are tablet speakers. By the way, pretty decent

    During trips, I always process photos, translating them from RAW to JPEG and subjecting them to various manipulations in Photoshop. To try the tablet in this form, I installed a trial version of Photoshop CS6 and opened several 20-megabyte RAWs made by the Sony Cyber-shot RX100 camera. Photos were opened in the converter just surprisingly vigorously, the difference with the ultrabook on Core i5 appeared only at the subsequent opening of the picture in Photoshop itself (it may have affected the low write speed to the built-in flash drive, where the brainchild of Adobe immediately dumps a copy). The manipulations I needed, like cropping and applying a Smart Sharpen filter, were carried out at the usual ultrabook speed.

    There is no need to talk about the fact that the tablet twists FullHD-video without problems. Although, taking into account the diagonal, here even 720p is enough in excess. It is worth noting decent stereo speakers: bass, of course, no, but medium and high work out well. And the volume margin is sufficient.

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    The BIOS battery was left the same size as in the ultrabook. Apparently, we didn’t forget - this is Computer

    Office applications, web surfing, working with photos, watching movies ... I don’t do anything else with my working ultrabook. It turns out that the tablet may well replace it?

    Yes and no. On short trips, now I will definitely take Dell Latitude 10 in a company with a small but very convenient Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard. This couple (a tablet in a backpack, a keyboard in luggage) will successfully replace an ultrabook with an iPad in work, entertainment and social networking. Moreover, all work files are in SkyDrive and Dropbox, and entertainment content on an external drive. At work, I don’t have a permanent monitor yet, and I’m probably not going to buy it for the sake of being able to effectively insert a tablet into the dock. I will continue to walk with an ultrabook. I have a hefty 18-inch Acer desktop with a 4-core Core i7 at home, so you know ...

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    So, I bought a computer only for business trips? It seems like that. But my performance requirements are much higher than that of a person in the business of selling, say, headphones. And I don't have to show presentations away often, so I don’t really need supermobility from a PC. But those who have five to six meetings a day in different parts of the city, I am sure, will agree to sacrifice a bit of productivity for the sake of compactness and weight.

    Well, purely from the technical side, the device is interesting. For the first time in my life, I had in my hands a real computer, on which you can not only consume content, but also create it fully. At the same time, it weighs 660 grams and runs on battery for up to 10 hours. And no fans inside.

    But how much will this miracle cost in Russia? The other day, on news feeds, there was information that at the end of February the Latitude 10 Essentials model will appear on the shelves, which differs from just the "dozens" of non-removable batteries. It will cost from 29,000 rubles. At Dell.com, it costs $ 579 excluding sales tax (i.e., only about $ 630). The full version with a removable battery has not yet been announced in Russia, and in the United States, I’ll remind you, they ask for it from $ 649 per tablet “without everything” to $ 949 per set, which also includes a docking station, keyboard, mouse and 20-inch monitor (more options complete sets can be studied here) Russian prices have not yet been announced, but most likely they will be significantly higher. Plus, as we know, Latitude 10 will not go to retail chains, but, like other "business" computers, it will be easy to buy it if you wish.

    I am very pleased that we met with Latitude 10 on that cold Austin morning. Not every day I manage to touch the future PC and take a piece with me.

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    The author thanks Alexander Levchenko (www.tech-town.ru) for his help in disassembling the tablet

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