The Dell Latitude 13 7390 2-in-1 Review

Battery Life

Although GPU performance is likely not the biggest concern for a business laptop, battery life certainly is. Dell offers the Latitude 7390 with a couple of battery options. The base Core i3 model comes with just a 45 Wh battery, but all other configurations come with a much more respectable 60 Wh version, but here you can also get the standard “ExpressCharge” 4 cell battery, or for a few dollars more, a "Long Life Cycle" battery.

To test battery life, we run through a couple of tests, all with the display set to 200 nits brightness, to provide an even playing field for all devices. Our web tests leverage Microsoft Edge, and for the movie playback, we use Films & TV.

2013 Light Web

Our first test is the easiest, and it’s just opening four web pages per minute. In 2018, it’s not a very difficult test, so the test is being phased out as we get more data for the newer test. Still, it’s the one we have the most data for, so it’s nice to have it for longer term comparisons.

Dell offers excellent battery life, thanks to the large battery, 1080p display, and 8^th gen CPU. Over 13 hours here is one of the better results we’ve gotten.

2016 Web

Our newer test is significantly more demanding, and the results show this, with the Latitude coming in over two hours less battery life than the older web test, but still, with over 11 hours, it’s still a great result, and would put this laptop into the all-day battery life category.

Normalized Results

Removing the battery capacity from the results lets us compare the platform efficiency, and here Dell does very well. It’s impressive how efficient the platform still is despite the doubling of CPU cores, and kind of makes us wonder what took so long to get the quad-cores in the Ultrabook category.

Movie Playback

Here the Dell got exactly 13 hours of battery life playing our test movie on repeat, which is quite good. The efficient platform, coupled with a fairly large battery for this size of notebook, really pays dividends here.

Tesseract

Just to put the movie playback in perspective, we divide the playback time by the length of The Avengers (which is just a nice long movie to use as a baseline) to get the Tesseract score. You could play The Avengers almost six times in one go with this laptop, which should be enough for almost anyone.

Charge Time

Dell couples the Latitude 7390 with a 65-Watt USB-C charging adapter. They offer an ExpressCharge battery option on this model by default, which allows quicker charging at the likely expense of overall battery life. As a business laptop, there’s no heat or other exotic tricks required to remove the bottom cover either, so battery replacement should be fairly straightforward.

At 153 minutes, the charge rate is pretty reasonable for this size of battery. You can also change the battery charging behavior, to optimize battery life, using the Dell Command Power Manager software. You can set the Advanced Charge settings to a schedule of when you normally work, so the battery will be fully charged when you need it, but kept dormant when you don’t.