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The Dell Latitude 7490 pumps out sweet sound, enough to fill a medium-size office. As I listened to a solid reproduction of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Run Away with Me" on the notebook, I noted that her vocals sounded clear, the bass hit well and the synths sounded accurate.
Dell Latitude 7490 - Full Review and Benchmarks | Laptop Mag Dell Latitude 7490 - Full Review and Benchmarks | Laptop Mag
Not providing a full-size SD card slot is mildly annoying, but adapters for Type-A USB ports don’t cost much. The Dell Latitude 7490 offers decent battery life, but we've seen better. When running the Laptop Mag Battery Test (web browsing at 150 nits), Dell's laptop burned through its charge in 8 hours and 55 minutes, which is pretty close to the 8:50 average for premium notebooks. The Huawei MateBook X Pro (9:55) lasted an hour longer, while the Lenovo ThinkPad T480 lasted less time in the default configuration (8:07) but provided many more hours of activity with its extended battery (17:19). The ports haven’t changed at all from the 7480 series, with triple USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A ports and a single Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C. There is also an RJ-45 Ethernet port, Smart Card slot, microSD card and SIM card receptacles. The integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU in the Dell Latitude 7490 pushed it to an Ice Storm Unlimited graphics test score of 87,894, which beats the 83,013 average and the 84,917 from the EliteBook 1040 G4 (Intel Integrated Graphics 630). We saw higher scores of 116,359 from the MateBook X Pro (Nvidia MX150 with 2GB of memory) and 132,991 from the ThinkPad T480 (Intel HD Graphics 620).Dell used an Intel 545s M.2 SATA drive in the review hardware, and on paper, it looks fine. But in some of our writing tests, it didn’t perform that well, and the IOPS it delivers don’t compare favorably with those you’d get from a Corsair or Western Digital.
Latitude 7490 Business Laptop | Dell USA Latitude 7490 Business Laptop | Dell USA
Once again, we come away from a Dell Latitude 7000 series machine thoroughly impressed. Along with Lenovo’s ThinkPads and HP’s EliteBooks, the Latitudes stand head and shoulders above the rest of the business competition. They’re thoughtfully designed, smartly updated, and carefully revised. While the 7490 remains a mere iterative update to the 7480 in every sense of the term, it truly leaves little to be desired. The case is sturdy, subdued, and attractive, the weight is manageable, the input devices are top-notch, performance is very good, battery life is lengthy, and it’s a quiet companion. The few areas of improvement we’d like to see are display options to match its competitors, improved thermal management, and better speakers.That’s the other weakness of this design, but it shares this limitation with every Intel 8th-gen machine of whatever specification. The Intel Core i5-8350U quad-core CPU is rapidly becoming the darling of laptop designers. It delivers much of the power that the Intel Core i7-8550U offers but has a lower unit cost and a less detrimental impact on battery life. The Latitude 7490 could stand to be brighter; it produced up to 277 nits, which falls below the 300-nit category average. The 269-nit ThinkPad T480 and the 278-nit EliteBook 1040 G4 are similarly bright, while the 458-nit MateBook X Pro is far brighter. While the Latitude 7490's matte screen helps reduce glare, the panel isn't bright enough for its colors to not invert when viewed at 30 degrees to the left and right.
Latitude 7490 14 inch Business Class Laptop | Dell UK Latitude 7490 14 inch Business Class Laptop | Dell UK
The 8GB of DDR4 system memory and 256GB of storage is enough to run, but heavy users might find that storage gets somewhat snug after a few months use. The Latitude 7490 scored a high 14,458 on the Geekbench 4 general performance benchmark, which leaps over the 10,033 category average. We saw lower scores of 12,913 from the Huawei MateBook X Pro (Intel Core i7-8550U with 16GB of RAM), 12,047 from the Lenovo ThinkPad T480 (Intel Core i5-8350U with 8GB of RAM) and 13,463 from the HP EliteBook 1040 G4 (Intel Core i7-7820HQ with 16GB of RAM). The ease of the disassembly process has not changed since our last review; some eight captive Phillips Head screws secure the bottom cover, and nearly every replaceable component is available immediately beneath the panel. One gripe which still applies here is that the keyboard is among the hardest of all FRUs to replace since it’s beneath the motherboard—though this is unfortunately a pretty common trend these days thanks to the thinness of the devices populating even the business segment (which are more and more akin to their consumer-grade counterparts as the years pass). There’s also an adhesive lining the LCD panel to help keep a consistent seal between the bezel and display that’s perilous during disassembly. In the event of a broken screen, technicians will need to take care to separate the bezel and panel surround without damaging anything. Given the amount of gutter space to the left and right of the keyboard, maybe a wider design could have been employed. That said, the keyboard design works well enough for typing, even with large hands.
A stunning new look
New Intel Kaby Lake R processors have gone beyond what designers could previously imagine with a 15W budget, and the review model had an Intel Core i5-8350U quad-core 1.7GHz (Turbo 3.6GHz) processor under the hood, which is the equal of many desktop CPUs.
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