The Good - The Dell Inspiron 11 3000 gives you the flexibility of a laptop and tablet in one ultraportable package at an affordable price. It has a long battery life, it looks good, and feels like it's solidly built. Plus, you can easily open it and upgrade storage and memory.
The Bad - The lower-end components limit performance. There are few configuration options, so if you want more than 4GB of memory or an SSD, you're on your own. The bottom can get uncomfortably hot.
The Bottom Line - With the Inspiron 11 3000, Dell delivers an everyday ultraportable hybrid with an excellent battery life at a good price.
It didn't take long for computer manufacturers to bring the hybrid design of Lenovo's Yoga series down to more affordable prices. The Dell Inspiron 11 3000, for example, takes the nearly $1,200 XPS 11 and strips it back to just essentials for less than $500, but without sacrificing the 360-degree hinges for its laptop-to-tablet-and-back-again design.
Like its competition, the 11 3000 has decidedly entry-level components. In the US, Dell has two configurations: one with a dual-core Intel Celeron N2830 and one with a quad-core Pentium N3530. These basically replace Intel Atom processors in this type of ultraportable and it's for the better, delivering more performance with improved power efficiency.
There is $50 separating their "market value" prices ($450 for the Celeron and $500 for the Pentium), though different deals come and go and at the time of this review the Celeron was $400 and the Pentium was $480 with all other specs -- 4GB of memory, integrated Intel HD graphics, and a 500GB 5,400rpm hard drive -- being the same.
The 11 3000 2-in-1 is currently unavailable on Dell's UK site (there's just the XPS 11 as yet), but in Australia you can pick up the Celeron configuration for AU$599 -- oddly enough, with dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which isn't available in the US version.
Design and features
Considering its price, the 11 3000 is a classy-looking laptop. No, it's not made from aluminum, but the plastic body is made to look like it from afar and it feels solid, not cheap. Though the hinge design adds some thickness to the system, it's still just under an inch thick (21 mm) with the rest of the body measuring 11.8 inches wide by 7.9 inches deep (300 by 202 mm).
At 3.1 pounds (1.4 kg) it's not heavy, but with all that weight packed into a relatively small package, it might feel a little more hefty than you would think. The weight becomes more noticeable when using it as a handheld tablet, so it's really best if you want a full-time laptop and a part-time tablet.
Open the laptop and, well, it looks like a typical clamshell laptop. The 1,366x768-pixel IPS touchscreen gives you wide viewing angles -- pretty important given the two-in-one design -- which the similarly configured HP Pavilion x360 doesn't have. Below the screen is a Windows logo key that can be set to go to Start menu or Desktop.
The keyboard is about as far forward as possible, leaving a fair amount of room below it for resting your palms and the wide touchpad. The keys are just big enough and there are no awkwardly small ones, so typing is accurate and comfortable: it shouldn't take much time, if any, for you to adjust to using it.
Key travel is good, so you won't feel like you're typing on flat board, and the keys are responsive and soft without feeling mushy. There is some flex toward the middle of the keyboard, but unless you're really hammering on it, it shouldn't be an issue.
The touchpad is OK, but you might want to crank up the palm rejection setting to help tame unwanted cursor movement. You may also want to shut off left and/or right-edge swiping and stick to the touchscreen for those. In fact, with the laptop's small size and the keyboard so far forward you may find yourself not using the touchpad as much as you would without a touchscreen anyway.
Since it can be used as a tablet, Dell put the power button and a volume rocker on the right side along with a USB 2.0 port, an SD card reader, and security slot. On the left you'll find the headphone/mic jack; one more USB 2.0 port as well as a USB 3.0 with sleep charging; a full-size HDMI output; and the power input.
Wireless options include Bluetooth 4.0 and 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi with a single antenna, not the newer 802.11ac and not dual-band.
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