The Dell Inspiron 14 (7437) ($1,049.99 as tested) is an attractive midrange ultrabook, fashioned of aluminum for a bit of premium bling. It also has excellent battery life and performed well on our benchmark tests. It’s an attention-grabbing choice for mainstream users who want premium ultrabook looks, but need to save a few bucks. However, a few issues—a bouncy screen, fuzzy backlighting on the keyboard, and the price—hold this system back.

Design and Features
The Inspiron 14 (7437) comes in a bright, silver-colored aluminum chassis with a black bezel around the touch screen. Silver keys on its backlit keyboard give it a monochromatic look. The key feel is satisfactory, but the backlit silver letters on the silver keyboard wash out in a normally lit room, making it harder to see the keys. Black keys with white lettering, like those on the Acer Aspire V7-482PG-6629( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window), our Editors’ Choice for midrange ultrabooks, and the Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (2013) ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window), are much easier to see in a wider variety of lighting conditions.

The 14-inch, 10-point touch screen is bright and has a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, which matches that of the Acer V7-482PG-6629’s display. This is sufficient for most users, even spreadsheet ninjas and people who do light to moderate photo editing. The touch screen and touchpad are both equally responsive, giving you more options for interacting with your laptop. This is an improvement over similarly priced non-touch-screen-equipped laptops like the Acer TravelMate TMP645-MG-9419( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window). If there’s any drawback to the screen, it’s that it bounces back and forth a bit when in use. The V70482PG-6629’s touch display is significantly more stable.

The chassis measures about 9.5 by 14.75 by 0.6 inches (HWD). Despite its slim profile, there is still room for two drives: a 32GB mSATA cache solid-state drive (SSD) and a 500GB, 5,400rpm SATA hard drive for storage. The SSD helps the system boot in about 10 seconds and to come back from sleep even faster, but overall performance on our benchmark tests still can’t match that of an ultrabook that uses SSD only (more on that below).

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At 4.12 pounds, it’s a little heavy compared with the 3.2-pound HP Spectre 13T-3000, and the thin chassis limits which connectors Dell can include. There’s a headset jack, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader, but only two USB 3.0 ports. You’ll fill one of the two ports if you need to use a USB-to-Ethernet adapter (not included). Wireless connectivity comes via 802.11a/b/g/n dual band Wi-Fi with WiDi support and Bluetooth 4.0.

Dell left plenty of free hard drive space on the system. Sure, you’ll find Amazon, Dell Shop, eBay, Kindle, McAfee LiveSafe (a 12-month subscription), Microsoft Office Trial, and Pocket Cloud on the Start screen, but that’s a fairly light load for a consumer-oriented laptop. Dell ships the Inspiron 14 (7437) with a 1-year warranty and 90 days of premium phone support.

Performance

You’d expect good performance from an ultrabook with an Intel Core i7-4500U processor, 8GB of memory, and the 32GB SSD+500GB hard drive combo. The nice surprise is that a system thus equipped would also get almost nine hours of battery life.

The 32GB SSD cache helped the Inspiron 14 (7437) garner 4,631 points on the PCMark 7 test, which measures day-to-day performance. This puts it within striking range of the SSD-only-equipped HP 13T-3000 (4,836) and Gigabyte U24T-CF1( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) (4,992). The Core i7 processor also helped the Dell ultrabook do well on the Handbrake (1:17) and Adobe Photoshop CS6 (4:24) multimedia benchmark tests. It was faster than the Gigabyte U24T-CF1, though the Acer TMP645-MG-9419 was the leader on the multimedia tests (0:46 on Handbrake; 2:53 on CS6). The Core i5-equipped Acer V7-482PG-6629 lagged behind by a few seconds on each test, but is otherwise competitive.

Performance on the 3D tests was unimpressive, which is typical for systems with integrated graphics. The Inspiron 14 (7437) returned mediocre scores on Aliens vs. Predator (16 frames per second at medium quality; 5fps at max quality), which is only slightly better than the HP Spectre (13fps at medium; 5fps at max). Casual gamers will want the discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 750M graphics in the Acer V7-482PG-6629, which boosts the performance to playable levels at medium quality (39fps), although maximum quality still looks like a slideshow (11fps).

The Inspiron 14 (7437) scored 8 hours 51 minutes on our battery rundown test. This is astonishing, considering that it comes with a powerful (read: battery draining) Core i7 processor and 1080p HD screen. The system’s 58-watt battery is responsible for its endurance. The HP 13T-3000 only managed a handful more minutes (8:58) with its slower Intel Core i5 processor, and the other Windows 8 systems also lagged behind. The Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (2013) is still the undisputed leader on the test at 11:26.

The Dell Inspiron 14 (7437) offers premium looks at a midrange price, and its performance—particularly its battery life—shows that it’s a solid system. Unfortunately, the screen bounce is a definite drawback for a touch-screen laptop, particularly with a list price higher than $1,000. The HP Spectre 13T-3000 offers better connectivity, a lighter aluminum chassis, and a list price that’s $50 lower. The Acer Aspire V7-482PG-6629 remains our Editors’ Choice for midrange ultrabooks, thanks to its better balance of features, functionality, and price, not to mention its discrete graphics chipset, which aids in gaming performance.