Dell Latitude 7390 2-In-1 Review: A Convertible Built For Business

Dell’s new Latitude 7390 2-in-1 ultrabook has a lot to offer. As a convertible, it is ergonomically comfortable to use with construction built for the road. Business-minded users will appreciate how the Latitude simply gets out of the way and allows them to focus on the task at hand, whatever that project may be; it is as at home with spreadsheets as it is with digital media.

Further, the Dell Active Pen implementation is among the best we’ve seen. We were surprised at how frequently we found ourselves reaching for it, thanks to its convenient magnetic attachment and responsive feel. We found touching up photos to be very natural with a great degree of control over the brush tool in Lightroom and Photoshop. Wacom style tablets are great for re-touchers, but it takes time to overcome the disconnect between having your hand on a tablet separate from the display -- no such issues here.


Still, the Latitude 7390 2-in-1 has some design limitations that make it tougher to recommend over the likes of Lenovo’s ThinkPad Yoga series or Dell’s own XPS 13 2-in-1. The biggest gripe we have is with its thermal solution. The high-end, quad core processor in our sample simply generates too much heat under sustained load for its single small blower and heatsink assembly to keep up with. We did not notice any major performance red flags in normal operation, but a Core i5 option would likely have been better suited to this particular machine's thermal solution. It is difficult to justify spending more on a higher-clocked, more powerful processor when it is likely going to throttle when placed under load.
The Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1 also commands a premium. Sure, our $2200 test unit is specified to the upper limited of configuration options, but according to our tests it was routinely beat by some more affordable machines, like the Acer Swift 3. Alternatively, a couple hundred bucks more can land you a Lenovo X1 Carbon with its impressive 1440p HDR display, equivalent-or-better specs, and better performance - though admittedly it's not a convertible.

If we try to save on cost and select a Core i5 configuration, we also lose the option to choose 16GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory and instead have to settle for just 8GB of 1866MHz LPDDR3 RAM. We hope Dell will add more configuration options, but we are unclear of its current plans in that regard. 8GB of system memory is more than acceptable for many users, but may not cut it for power users.

All told though, we did enjoy working with the Latitude 7390 2-in-1. It is an attractive device, that's built well with a great feature set and an optimized pen input experience. It just faces some stiff competition in the current 2-in-1 convertible and business class ultrabook markets.