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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 Dell Latitude 7490 gets warm, but only on the bottom . After we streamed 15 minutes of HD video on the notebook, our heat gun captured a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit on the center of its underside, and up to 107 degrees closer to its hinge. Both temperatures exceed our 95-degree comfort threshold, while the readings from the touchpad (84 degrees) and keyboard (93 degrees) did not. Today’s Latitude 7490 retains the 1920x1080 resolution, but exchanges the embedded touch display of our previous unit with a conventional IPS, non-touch, matte panel. Subjectively, color seems vivid, contrast appears strong, and brightness is fairly good. Our measurements revealed an average brightness of 294 cd/m²—ever-so-slightly below that of the embedded touch model—and a very good contrast ratio of 1342:1. While the ThinkPad T480s and the EliteBook 840 G5 in our comparison table only achieve results slightly above these, the X1 Carbon absolutely blows them all away with an average brightness of 533 cd/m²—and the 840 G5 offers a superior FHD IPS display option with a mind-blowing 630 cd/m² result. While today’s screen is certainly nice enough, Dell should consider stepping up their options for the next model to stay in competition. According to our colorimeter, the Latitude 7490 reproduces 118 percent of the sRGB spectrum -- a measurement that rises above the 113-percent premium-notebook average. It's close to the 124-percent rating from the Huawei MateBook X Pro and the 114-percent rating from the HP EliteBook 1040 G4. The Lenovo ThinkPad T480 posted a less-colorful 77 percent. The Dell Latitude 7490's got the speed you need (and then some), a keyboard that's comfortable enough for writing all day long and a battery that supports a full 8-hour workday. If only the display were brighter and it managed heat better.
Dell Latitude 7490 review | TechRadar Dell Latitude 7490 review | TechRadar
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. Using a Datacolor Spyder5 calibrator, we analyzed the screen and found that it could display 99% of the sRGB gamut and 75% of AdobeRGB. Those are good numbers for a portable device, even if they’re not high enough for professional color work. Battery life The included Waves MaxxAudio Pro sound utility allows you to disable its sound-boosting presets, but I recommend you leave it as is. You'll see options for adjusting width, detail and bass, but the default settings are just right.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). Not providing a full-size SD card slot is mildly annoying, but adapters for Type-A USB ports don’t cost much.
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. That’s the other weakness of this design, but it shares this limitation with every Intel 8th-gen machine of whatever specification.The 256GB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD in the Latitude 7490 duplicated 4.97GB of multimedia files in 17 seconds, for a rate of 299.36 MBps. That's faster than the 277.5 MBps premium-notebook average, the 282.73 MBps from the MateBook X Pro (512GB NVMe PCIe SSD), the 267 MBps from the ThinkPad T480 (256GB NVMe PCIe SSD) and the 282.7 MBps from the EliteBook 1040 G4 (512GB PCIe NVMe TLC SSD). Where others obfuscate the exact nature of their devices with paint and thin metal facings, Dell embraces plastic as its material of choice, and the surface finish achieved with it is admirable.
Latitude 7490 Business Laptop | Dell USA Latitude 7490 Business Laptop | Dell USA
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. 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. The Latitude 7490 finished our HandBrake video transcoding test (converting a 4K video to 1080p) in 21 minutes and 35 seconds, which is only slightly shorter than the 22:11 category average. The MateBook X Pro (27:18) took longer, and the ThinkPad T480 (18:09) took less time.
Emissions
As a replacement for the previous 7480 models, the new 7490 looks much the same from the outside, but has had a complete overhaul internally.
Dell Latitude 7490 review - TechRadar Performance and verdict - Dell Latitude 7490 review - TechRadar
Another strong point is the AU Optronics 14-inch IPS panel that’s a decent brightness and has a healthy color gamut. It also doesn’t use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to adjust brightness, with the negative impact that can have on eyesight. 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. 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. I should note that I had to take the photo in front of the window, where I had natural light, because images taken at my desk were far darker.The review machine didn’t have the LTE module to make use of the SIM slot, and as the standard for these isn’t a global one, the options for the LTE hardware will be different around the world. 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. The CPU-related tasks all hit great numbers, and not far from what the Core i7-8550U-based machines are capable of. As they share an identical Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU, the results for anything graphical are almost the same.
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