**Dell XPS 13 Plus Review: A Thin and Portable Laptop with Some Compromises**

I have to say, I was really impressed with the Dell XPS 13 Plus. It's a very thin and portable laptop that checks all the right boxes for a mobile computing device. The body is incredibly slim at just 0.33 inches thick and weighs only 2.7 pounds, making it easy to toss into a backpack or purse. However, as I delved deeper into the laptop's features and performance, I started to notice some compromises that might make it less than ideal for certain users.

One of the things I was most excited about was the battery life. Dell claims that the XPS 13 Plus can last up to 12 hours on a single charge, but in my testing, I found that it didn't quite live up to that promise. Even with moderate use, I only managed to get around four plus hours of battery life out of it. This was surprising, especially considering the laptop's thin and lightweight design.

Fan Noise and Heat

Another thing that caught my attention was the fan noise and heat issue. Dell claims that the XPS 13 Plus has a balanced power and performance battery life and fan noise and heat, but I found that to be somewhat subjective. While the laptop did get pretty hot during intense use, the fan wasn't loud enough to be distracting. However, once in a while, it would still get kind of loud and make me feel like the laptop was working hard.

Webcam

One aspect of the XPS 13 Plus that I was really looking forward to was the webcam. Dell boasts that the camera has some "cool tricks" behind the scenes to make it seem better than its 720p resolution suggests. While I won't deny that it's not a bad webcam, I have to say that I was disappointed by the lack of full HD (1080p) resolution. Most laptops have switched to 1080p cameras, and it's surprising that Dell held out for so long.

The camera does have some features that might appeal to users, however. For example, there's a feature called "Look Away Detect" that dims the screen if you turn away from it for more than a couple of seconds. This is supposed to be good for battery life and privacy, and I have to admit that it was kind of cool.

Thunderbolt Ports

Another compromise I found with the XPS 13 Plus is the lack of Thunderbolt ports. Dell only has two USB-C/USB-A ports, which might seem like a minor issue until you realize how often users need multiple ports at once. While there is an adapter included in the box that can convert the USB-C port to a USB-A port and another one that can charge devices via USB-C, it's still not ideal.

Overall Performance

Despite some compromises, I have to say that the XPS 13 Plus is still a very nice laptop. The performance is great, and the display is excellent. However, as I mentioned earlier, the battery life was a major letdown for me.

Design Innovations

Dell has made some interesting design decisions with the XPS 13 Plus. For example, they've used a new hinge mechanism that allows the screen to fold back at an angle of up to 180 degrees. This is supposed to make it easier to work in different positions and angles, which I can appreciate.

Another design feature that I found interesting was the "Power Button" placement on the keyboard. Instead of having a traditional power button like most laptops, Dell has placed it on the right-hand side of the keyboard, where you access the Fn key.

In conclusion, while the Dell XPS 13 Plus is still a great laptop with many innovative features, there are some compromises that might make it less than ideal for certain users. I would recommend this laptop to anyone who needs a portable device for light use, such as web browsing and streaming. However, if you need a laptop for more demanding tasks or want better battery life, you might want to consider other options.

**Full Disclosure**

I want to note that my review is based on the Dell XPS 13 Plus 13" laptop model with the Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. This configuration may have some differences compared to other configurations available in the market.

**Additional Resources**

To read more about my testing methods and results, please check out our full review at [link]. We also provide detailed charts and graphs that compare the XPS 13 Plus with other laptops in its class.

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This article is based on the provided transcription.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhen you open up the dell xps 13 plus three things are going to jump out at you immediately as being kind of unusual not necessarily bad just a little bit unconventional may take a little bit of getting used to now the first thing you're going to notice i think very obviously is the touchpad which is basically a touchpad you can't see it's invisible all across the front wrist rest here it's just one big empty expanse and you might look at it and say oh is that all touchpad but it's actually not all touchpad and you almost wouldn't want that that seems like a nightmare for palm rejection however the touchpad is here it's just not demarcated in any way now i found that messing around with it it goes from the edge of the space bar on this side to the edge of the alt key on this side so it's a regular size you know generous touch pad and i actually found surprisingly that even though i think it's a big muscle memory issue uh i didn't really have a lot of trouble staying where the touch pad was supposed to be i would still kind of like some little faint lines here or maybe have this part just light up or something like that but it wasn't a deal breaker it's interesting to note this is actually a totally flat piece of glass because of haptics built into it it feels like you're clicking on it when you click down on it but much like apple's touch pads it's not actually moving it's not actually clicking down it's just giving a little haptic movement that gives you that illusion that said i'm a tapper not a clicker so you know big deal the next thing that's going to jump out at you is a little bit unusual about this laptop is the keyboard it's got these edge to edge flat keys really goes from all the way here to all the way here almost no space between the keys they're just totally tightly bunched together this was a style i saw a bunch in the 2010s i have not seen it much lately it's back here maybe to give you bigger keycaps you know more surface area on them but keep everything very thin i still think a traditional island style keyboard is going to be more satisfying get a little more snap out of it these are a little bit shallow but it also was unusual but not a deal breaker for me now the third thing is the function key row up here as you can see it's not actually keys it is a backlit touch strip that runs all the way across here and if you're thinking to yourself that sounds a lot like the apple touch bar that uh everyone has a love-hate relationship with and frankly over time it veered more towards hate and apple ended up dropping it from almost every macbook well here's a version of it here although it doesn't do everything that touch bar from apple did that was an actual oled secondary display that you could put basically anything on this is just a set of function keys it's locked into that so basically you've got the media control keys brightness stuff like that cool and then if you hold down the function key then you get f1 f2 f3 f4 and touching them it frankly works fine and i have to say i've never run into a case where if somebody had physical buttons for something replaced them with flat fake touch buttons and thought it was better that way i could still live with these function keys just fine there may be one exception that's the escape key i think people use that a lot and they really like having a physical escape key i heard that all the time about the apple touch bar and that's something where i feel like you really do want to actually have a button you can just reach up without looking and make sure that you press it now why did dell get rid of the function key row here i hear it's because they wanted to make the system thinner thin is always good this thing is about 15 millimeters thick and that's actually impressive considering i can get up to a 12th gen intel core i7 p series in here that said i think weight is more important maybe battery life is more important thickness for a laptop is not actually as important as some people think it is i also like that this is a very configurable system even though it is dell's premium version of the already premium xps 13 starts at 12.99 this configures closer to 2000 because i've got the upgraded cpu i've got more ram more storage i've got one of the higher end screen options and that's something i really like is that you can get multiple display options on here the least expensive the basic is just a regular full hd 1920 by 1080 ish screen you can get a touch version of that for a little bit more this is an almost 4k i think they call it 3.5 k oled touchscreen which is awesome looks great you can also just get a full 4k screen that's not an oled one i would say you would either go for the oled screen because it looks the best or if you're looking to save money get the regular full hd screen with touch because frankly on a small windows laptop you do kind of want touch even if you're not going to use it all the time now because i have a pretty high end cpu in here that core i7 i thought performance was really great out of this that said it's a lot of fan noise sometimes and it still gets really hot when you have a powerful cpu in a very thin laptop like this no matter what you do it's gonna get hot and the fans are gonna go crazy there are actually some thermal settings you can go into within dell's own built-in app they have like a performance mode a quiet mode in optimize mode that's when i usually left it in the optimize mode that would supposedly balance power and performance battery life and fan noise and heat i still found the fan got kind of loud and it still got pretty hot even doing that now one thing i'm less pleased with here is the webcam built in up here it's a 720 camera while most laptops have moved to 1080 cameras full hd cameras they didn't do it for a long time but once coveted hit and people started working from home there was a big demand for better quality cameras and laptops because we were doing these meetings all the time and shooting videos like this all the time so even apple which held off for the longest time now has really good full hd cameras in almost all of their laptops for example it's in the new m2 macbook air and it works really well the 720 camera dell says some software behind the scenes makes it seem better than that it's it's okay it definitely was not great in low light you can do windows hello facial recognition login with it but again i had some trouble with it it was always telling me to back up or look at it from a different angle not as seamless as i hoped it would be and especially for something that's called the plus and has a premium price i really want that 1080 camera better camera i'm sure dell would say they couldn't fit it in the super thin lid like that again i'll exchange a little bit of thinness for better components and you know just a better overall product the camera does have some cool tricks though again if you go into the dell menu you can set up some uh detection features where if you step away from the laptop it'll lock by itself if you come close to it it'll open up by itself the coolest one i thought was called look away detect where really if i'm looking at the screen it's on if i turn away for more than a couple of seconds i can see in my peripheral vision the um screen actually dims and that's good for battery life and that's good for privacy and as soon as they look back it brightened back up you have to go in and turn that on to make it work but i thought that was kind of cool now another compromise i wasn't crazy about is the fact that there are just two thunderbolt usbc ports on there you might say to yourself well that's what a macbook has that's fine it's true but that macbook still has audio jack a headphone jack here they take that out to dell's credit in the box there's a usbc to usba adapter and a usbc to headphone adapter but if let's say you've got a charging on one port and you've got the other port being used to connect your headphones or your you know your headset for meetings then then you're out of ports i'm not saying you need a ton of ports but taking the headphone jack out phones do it i'm not quite sure we're ready for that in laptops just yet and my last big complaint about the xps 13 plus and i hate to make it sound like i have a ton of complaints because it's frankly still a very nice laptop that i really enjoyed is for all the talk about performance and thinness and portability the battery life was not great uh no matter how i tried to optimize it it just did not come anywhere near what let's say a macbook air would do or even what the regular xps 13 does i would get maybe four plus hours from it i found the battery drain very quickly i really had to keep the plug with me or i had to constantly plug it in to top it off i did not have a lot of confidence i could take this put in my bag go out go about my day and i would not get stranded with a dead battery somewhere i had to really make sure i had a usbc charging cable with me now for something that is a very small 13-inch thin portable laptop to not have great battery life i mean that's a real deal breaker for a lot of people i totally get that so the xps 13 plus it's got a lot of really interesting design innovations some seem like they're really forward thinking some seem like they're just changed for change's sake and some seem like they're sacrifices you're making to squeeze everything into a very thin body now that said i want to see some of these changes and ideas move into other laptops other dell laptops maybe other laptop companies will take some of these ideas and use them for whatever the next version of this is you can keep all the other stuff i would just like to see a better webcam and you know what trade away a little bit of the thinness and give me a better battery if you want to read my full review of the xps 13 plus along with all our testing charts and numbers and results you're going to find that link right down belowwhen you open up the dell xps 13 plus three things are going to jump out at you immediately as being kind of unusual not necessarily bad just a little bit unconventional may take a little bit of getting used to now the first thing you're going to notice i think very obviously is the touchpad which is basically a touchpad you can't see it's invisible all across the front wrist rest here it's just one big empty expanse and you might look at it and say oh is that all touchpad but it's actually not all touchpad and you almost wouldn't want that that seems like a nightmare for palm rejection however the touchpad is here it's just not demarcated in any way now i found that messing around with it it goes from the edge of the space bar on this side to the edge of the alt key on this side so it's a regular size you know generous touch pad and i actually found surprisingly that even though i think it's a big muscle memory issue uh i didn't really have a lot of trouble staying where the touch pad was supposed to be i would still kind of like some little faint lines here or maybe have this part just light up or something like that but it wasn't a deal breaker it's interesting to note this is actually a totally flat piece of glass because of haptics built into it it feels like you're clicking on it when you click down on it but much like apple's touch pads it's not actually moving it's not actually clicking down it's just giving a little haptic movement that gives you that illusion that said i'm a tapper not a clicker so you know big deal the next thing that's going to jump out at you is a little bit unusual about this laptop is the keyboard it's got these edge to edge flat keys really goes from all the way here to all the way here almost no space between the keys they're just totally tightly bunched together this was a style i saw a bunch in the 2010s i have not seen it much lately it's back here maybe to give you bigger keycaps you know more surface area on them but keep everything very thin i still think a traditional island style keyboard is going to be more satisfying get a little more snap out of it these are a little bit shallow but it also was unusual but not a deal breaker for me now the third thing is the function key row up here as you can see it's not actually keys it is a backlit touch strip that runs all the way across here and if you're thinking to yourself that sounds a lot like the apple touch bar that uh everyone has a love-hate relationship with and frankly over time it veered more towards hate and apple ended up dropping it from almost every macbook well here's a version of it here although it doesn't do everything that touch bar from apple did that was an actual oled secondary display that you could put basically anything on this is just a set of function keys it's locked into that so basically you've got the media control keys brightness stuff like that cool and then if you hold down the function key then you get f1 f2 f3 f4 and touching them it frankly works fine and i have to say i've never run into a case where if somebody had physical buttons for something replaced them with flat fake touch buttons and thought it was better that way i could still live with these function keys just fine there may be one exception that's the escape key i think people use that a lot and they really like having a physical escape key i heard that all the time about the apple touch bar and that's something where i feel like you really do want to actually have a button you can just reach up without looking and make sure that you press it now why did dell get rid of the function key row here i hear it's because they wanted to make the system thinner thin is always good this thing is about 15 millimeters thick and that's actually impressive considering i can get up to a 12th gen intel core i7 p series in here that said i think weight is more important maybe battery life is more important thickness for a laptop is not actually as important as some people think it is i also like that this is a very configurable system even though it is dell's premium version of the already premium xps 13 starts at 12.99 this configures closer to 2000 because i've got the upgraded cpu i've got more ram more storage i've got one of the higher end screen options and that's something i really like is that you can get multiple display options on here the least expensive the basic is just a regular full hd 1920 by 1080 ish screen you can get a touch version of that for a little bit more this is an almost 4k i think they call it 3.5 k oled touchscreen which is awesome looks great you can also just get a full 4k screen that's not an oled one i would say you would either go for the oled screen because it looks the best or if you're looking to save money get the regular full hd screen with touch because frankly on a small windows laptop you do kind of want touch even if you're not going to use it all the time now because i have a pretty high end cpu in here that core i7 i thought performance was really great out of this that said it's a lot of fan noise sometimes and it still gets really hot when you have a powerful cpu in a very thin laptop like this no matter what you do it's gonna get hot and the fans are gonna go crazy there are actually some thermal settings you can go into within dell's own built-in app they have like a performance mode a quiet mode in optimize mode that's when i usually left it in the optimize mode that would supposedly balance power and performance battery life and fan noise and heat i still found the fan got kind of loud and it still got pretty hot even doing that now one thing i'm less pleased with here is the webcam built in up here it's a 720 camera while most laptops have moved to 1080 cameras full hd cameras they didn't do it for a long time but once coveted hit and people started working from home there was a big demand for better quality cameras and laptops because we were doing these meetings all the time and shooting videos like this all the time so even apple which held off for the longest time now has really good full hd cameras in almost all of their laptops for example it's in the new m2 macbook air and it works really well the 720 camera dell says some software behind the scenes makes it seem better than that it's it's okay it definitely was not great in low light you can do windows hello facial recognition login with it but again i had some trouble with it it was always telling me to back up or look at it from a different angle not as seamless as i hoped it would be and especially for something that's called the plus and has a premium price i really want that 1080 camera better camera i'm sure dell would say they couldn't fit it in the super thin lid like that again i'll exchange a little bit of thinness for better components and you know just a better overall product the camera does have some cool tricks though again if you go into the dell menu you can set up some uh detection features where if you step away from the laptop it'll lock by itself if you come close to it it'll open up by itself the coolest one i thought was called look away detect where really if i'm looking at the screen it's on if i turn away for more than a couple of seconds i can see in my peripheral vision the um screen actually dims and that's good for battery life and that's good for privacy and as soon as they look back it brightened back up you have to go in and turn that on to make it work but i thought that was kind of cool now another compromise i wasn't crazy about is the fact that there are just two thunderbolt usbc ports on there you might say to yourself well that's what a macbook has that's fine it's true but that macbook still has audio jack a headphone jack here they take that out to dell's credit in the box there's a usbc to usba adapter and a usbc to headphone adapter but if let's say you've got a charging on one port and you've got the other port being used to connect your headphones or your you know your headset for meetings then then you're out of ports i'm not saying you need a ton of ports but taking the headphone jack out phones do it i'm not quite sure we're ready for that in laptops just yet and my last big complaint about the xps 13 plus and i hate to make it sound like i have a ton of complaints because it's frankly still a very nice laptop that i really enjoyed is for all the talk about performance and thinness and portability the battery life was not great uh no matter how i tried to optimize it it just did not come anywhere near what let's say a macbook air would do or even what the regular xps 13 does i would get maybe four plus hours from it i found the battery drain very quickly i really had to keep the plug with me or i had to constantly plug it in to top it off i did not have a lot of confidence i could take this put in my bag go out go about my day and i would not get stranded with a dead battery somewhere i had to really make sure i had a usbc charging cable with me now for something that is a very small 13-inch thin portable laptop to not have great battery life i mean that's a real deal breaker for a lot of people i totally get that so the xps 13 plus it's got a lot of really interesting design innovations some seem like they're really forward thinking some seem like they're just changed for change's sake and some seem like they're sacrifices you're making to squeeze everything into a very thin body now that said i want to see some of these changes and ideas move into other laptops other dell laptops maybe other laptop companies will take some of these ideas and use them for whatever the next version of this is you can keep all the other stuff i would just like to see a better webcam and you know what trade away a little bit of the thinness and give me a better battery if you want to read my full review of the xps 13 plus along with all our testing charts and numbers and results you're going to find that link right down below\n"