Dell Latitude 5455 review: The B2B laptop for professionals on the go.

The Dell Latitude is a business-oriented laptop, unlike the Inspiron or XPS, which are targeted at the mainstream user. If I have to give a point of comparison, it competes more with the Acer TravelMate or HP Elitebook rather than the Acer Swift or HP Envy. So, this review will be a little different. I used this laptop for almost two weeks as my primary work laptop to see how well it can work for a business user. 

Key Specifications at a Glance

• Price: Rs 1,19,950
• Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus
• Display: 14-inch 16:10 FHD+ (1920x1200p) IPS non touchscreen display, 300nits peak brightness, anti-glare
• Refresh Rate: 60Hz
• RAM: 16GB LPDDR5X 8448MHz
• Storage: 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
• Wireless Connectivity: Dual-band Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
• Connectivity: 2 x USB Type-C USB 4.0 with Power Delivery & DisplayPort 2.1, 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 with Power Share, 1x Optional Touch Fingerprint Reader in Power Button, 1 x Universal Audio jack, 1 x Micro SD Reader

• Battery: 54Whr
• AC Adapter: 65W
• Weight: ~1.5 Kg

Design, build, and connectivity

Kicking things off with the design, we have a minimal design perfect for the boardroom. The entire laptop has a Titan Gray finish, which is a signature colour for many Dell laptops. A lot of people could tell this is a Dell laptop from afar, and that is a good thing. You also have the Dell logo in the centre of the lid. Lift the lid, and you are greeted with the 14-inch anti-glare display.

The hinge is very strong, with almost no wobble on the display. You can’t lift the lid with a single finger without wobbling the laptop, which might bother a very small set of people. But overall, the hinge is very sturdy, and while the display doesn’t go back all the way, it has very good angles for everyday use. When the display is open, it also helps slightly elevate the laptop for good airflow below and creates a slight incline in the keyboard for a good typing experience when kept on a table.  

Next up is the keyboard, which is not a full-sized one but is large enough for a comfortable typing experience. The keys have a decent amount of travel and feedback, so if you write long documents or emails, the keyboard is good. It is a backlit keyboard, and you have two brightness settings for the backlighting. I mostly left it on the brightest option and forgot about it as it isn’t too bright to hinder your experience in a dark room, yet bright enough to illuminate all the keys clearly, irrespective of the lighting conditions around you.

In terms of secure login, the laptop supports both fingerprint unlock via the power button, as well as Windows Hello thanks to the IR Webcam. Dell has also added a physical shutter to the webcam to keep your privacy in check.

Moving over to the trackpad, while it is large and easy to navigate with support for multi-gestures, it isn’t the smoothest out there. As a productivity user, I always use an external mouse, so the slight “roughness” in the feel of the trackpad didn’t bother me much. The trackpad is very responsive but isn’t as smooth as the one found on the new M4 Macbook Air or even the ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip I recently reviewed. Note that these aren’t the direct competition for the Latitude we are reviewing today, but just perspectives from the different machines I’ve used around the same time. Of course, this is a small gripe in an otherwise good experience.

Overall, the laptop is robust, with its aluminium build. Its rectangular design with smooth, rounded edges makes it comfortable to type on and carry. 

Moving to connectivity, the left of the laptop houses the USB-C ports along with the SD card reader, and the right has the 3.5mm port along with the USB-A port. Since this is a B2B laptop, an HDMI port would have been nice as the few meetings I went to with this laptop, an HDMI cable was available for me to show the presentations, but most organisations still don’t have a “dongle” at hand when a non-employee has come to present a PPT, and they cannot connect to a display. So you will need to carry one with you at all times. The bottom of the laptop has an intake of fresh air to keep the laptop cool, and there are rubber feet to ensure there is enough space for airflow. 

Display

The first thing that will stand out when you use this display is the anti-glare layer. I use this laptop on my desk with a direct light source reflecting off the display. I used it at an airport, in a cab on my way to a meeting, and in different offices with different light sources, and in all conditions, I could see the content clearly on the display, which is very good. It is a standard 14-inch 1200p 60Hz display with a 16:10 aspect ratio, giving you more room for your spreadsheet and bigger black bars when watching Netflix.

The viewing angles of the display are good for work. I had a few people huddle on my desk going through a PPT and we could all see it clearly. While watching movies, you will miss a slightly punchier display, but binging on a few episodes of Succession on JioHotstar was a good experience on the laptop. The refresh rate is 60Hz, which is fine for a productivity laptop, and while the pixel peepers in you might want something higher than an FHD+ display, for most of us, it gets the job done. 

Audio

Moving over to the sound output, the laptop has two bottom-firing speakers, and when kept on a table, they sound pretty decent. For video calls, they get really loud and clear and I found myself limiting the volume to 50% when working from my fortress of solitude at home which doesn’t have any ambient noise. However, at the office, 75-90% volume was used to take calls. Watching movies and TV shows, the dialogue clarity is clean, but the mixed audio of bangs and thuds of action movies is nothing to write home about. 

Performance

Let’s get down to the belly of the beast – the performance of the Dell Latitude 5455! Below is a look at some synthetic benchmarks of the Dell Latitude 5455. We tested it across our suite of benchmarks, including Cinebench, GeekBench, and 3DMark. While some benchmarks like PCMark and 3DMark Time Spy didn’t run on the ARM-based processor, everything else performed pretty well.

We’ve also compared it to similarly priced laptops, including the ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7-256V, Asus Zenbook A14 OLED, which is also Qualcomm-powered but cheaper, and the AMD-powered Vivobook S 14. We’ve also included the benchmarks HP Omnibook X 14 for the perspective of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite when compared to the X Plus powering this Dell. 

While the Intel Core Ultra 7–256V-powered ASUS takes the cake for battery life, the Dell Latitude 5455 aligns with its peers. This is not bad, considering how young the Snapdragon X family is in the laptop space. Speaking of battery life…

Battery

You aren’t going to buy this laptop for its benchmark performance, so let’s move over to some real-world performance. I could easily get through an 8-9 hour work day on this laptop left with 10-20% battery at the end of the day. However, if I have more than 2 hours of video calls in the day, then I need to resort to the charger for a bit. During my time, I worked on a bunch of presentations, did some Excel work, wrote a part of this review, wrote another review, replied to emails, presented some PPTs, and Google Meets calls, all while having my 45 tabs open in Chrome.

The only recommendation I have is that whether you are using the laptop on battery mode or plugged in, keep the power mode to ‘best performance’ as switching to balanced or best power efficiency left me with slowdown and stutters. There are other neat tricks to help you save battery, such as reducing the brightness when you look away, using dark mode, reducing the screen brightness, and so on, which work well.

The laptop also managed to play GTA V at an average of 57FPS, which is nice if you want to play casual games on it. When I was a kid, I played a lot of Road Rash on my dad’s “work computer,” so I can imagine a few kids taking this laptop from their parents for a bit of casual gaming. 

AI

AI is still nascent on the PC, and we have started running Geekbench AI as a benchmark. You can take a look at how it performs here.

In real-world scenarios, tasks in Copilot on the laptop to help find locations, write emails, generate cat images, etc., worked fine during my use. I even used Copilot to help make an itinerary for my recent Mumbai visit, and it worked as intended.  

Verdict

If you are purely a business user and got this laptop from your employer, you shouldn’t have any real complaints. What the device has going for it is very good build quality, a very good keyboard for typing content, an anti-glare display that works well in different lighting conditions, decent overall performance, and a day-long battery life. It is also really lightweight and comfortable to carry/use for long durations. Where it falters is that Windows on ARM still has bugs to iron out, and that’s more of a Qualcomm-Microsoft thing to fix. However, there are laptops in a similar price range that offer better battery life, and my biggest gripe is the lack of an HDMI port. For an asking price of Rs 1,19,950 + taxes for the configuration I have, it is a tad steep, especially if you compare it with Dell’s own lineup as well as the competition’s “non-business” laptop lineup. Then again, they wouldn’t come with Dell’s security features such as Dell SafeID and Secure BIOS, which is a big factor for business users.

Editor’s rating: 7.5 / 10

Pros

• Decent battery life for productivity
• Well built with a comfortable keyboard
• Anti-glare display works well under different lighting conditions
• Good security features

Cons

• The raw performance could have been better in battery mode
• Windows on ARM still isn’t perfect
• No HDMI port