Dell's Latitude 9510 takes a different approach to executive laptops, adding in a 15-in display in a unit the size you normally would expect for a 14-inch laptop.
This is available as either a standard laptop or a 2-in-1; the latter is what I used for the past few weeks.
I've found it to be a very solid, well-built laptop, and that the larger display is very nice.
The biggest trade-off is weight and size, but that may well be worthwhile, particularly for people who spend a lot of time each day looking at the screen.
It follows in the footsteps of the Latitude 7400 I looked at last year, which are now called the 9410 (with the latest generation processors), but with a larger display.
Because of the larger display, it is notably larger than 14-inch laptops, measuring 0.55 by 13.4 by 8.5 inches, but it's surprisingly thin.
It's a bit heavier than other executive laptops: The laptop version starts at 3.1 pounds and the 2-in-1 starts at 3.3 pounds, but with the larger 88 watt-hour battery I tested, it comes in a 3.7 pounds, plus 12.5 ounces for the charger.
Again, you'd expect this for a larger laptop.
It makes it a bit harder to travel with than a 14-inch laptop, but it's the lightest, smallest 15-inch business laptop I've used.
A 15-in laptop has worked well during the pandemic where I've mostly been using it at home.
Like most laptops in this category, the Latitude 9510 feels very well made.
It has an aluminum chassis, and the display has very small bezels.
The keyboard has good travel, and the touchpad is large and responsive, among the best I've ever used on a laptop.
It was a pleasure to use.
The 1,920-by-1,080 (FHD) 400-nit display was fine, but I was a bit surprised to see that there aren't currently options for a 4K display, a privacy screen, or a brighter display.
The bigger the screen, the more important you would think these options become.
The device has large speaker grills on either side of the keyboard, and the device has four top-firing speakers and four noise-cancelling microphones.
This works great in laptop mode.
I thought sound quality was quite good.
For web conferencing, the front-facing camera seemed sharp, but a bit darker than what I've seen on recent HP and Lenovo machines in this class.
One interesting option is Express Sign-In, which makes use of an IR camera and an optional proximity sensor to take the camera-based Windows Hello login and make it more seamless.
Thus the machine locks itself and turns down the display when you walk away and unlocks automatically when you come back, without you having to touch anything.
This worked well, and is quite convenient.
There's also an optional fingerprint reader that can be built into the power button on the keyboard, but that wasn't on my test unit.
I was a bit surprised that it doesn't have a physical switch to turn the webcam on and off, unlike most of its competitors.
My test unit had an Intel 10th Generation Core i7-10810U (Comet Lake) processor, a six-core/12-thread processor with support for vPro, Intel's management platform, along with 16GB of memory.
In general, it felt perfectly fast in normal use.
However, I was disappointed that in most of my benchmark tests, this processor was notably slower than four-core/eight-thread Comet Lake processors, or even the 8th Generation Intel processors or the Ryzen 4500.
My guess is that is because the six-core Comet Lake only runs at a base clock speed of 1.1GHz, compared with 1.6- to 1.8GHz on the four-core Intel processors.
(Maximum turbo is theoretically 4.9GHz.) This was most notable to me running a very large but real-world Excel model with a big data table and Monte Carlo simulations, where it took about 50 percent longer than the four-core Intel alternatives.
Of course, you can order it with a variety of other Intel Comet Lake processors, including four-core versions.
I'd recommend not choosing the six-core one unless you have some specific application you think will run better with more threads.
The unit I tested had a larger optional 88 watt-hour battery (the base units have a 52 watt-hour battery), and it did phenomenally well in my battery tests, easily passing 24 hours.
The left-side of the machine has an HDMI 2.0 port, two USB Type-C/Thunderbolt ports (also used for charging), and a microSD card reader; the right side has a single traditional USB-A port, an audio jack, and a locking dock.
It supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6, and there's an eSim option for LTE support, with 5G promised.
Overall, it's great to see a 15-inch executive laptop in a smaller footprint and the 9510 is a solid if pricey choice in the category.
At this point, I would choose a four-core processor over a six-core one, and I would like to have seen a few more display options, but the 9510 is a great addition to the high-end line.
Here's Daxdi's full review.
