Dell XPS 11 review

Dell's hybrid takes a Yoga-like turn 

 

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Price: $999.99

The good: The Dell XPS 11 is a slim, light hybrid that looks and feels great, and offers decent performance and battery life.

The bad: The touch-style keyboard, lacking actual keys, is an experiment that just doesn't pan out.

The bottom line: Attempting to out-Yoga the Yoga, Dell's flip-screen XPS 11 has a great design, but isn't as practical as other hybrids for actually getting work done thanks to a frustrating keyboard.

The new Dell XPS 11 hybrid shows that Dell is still capable of swinging for the fences, and putting out a laptop that looks and feels like a true premium product. The XPS 11 is an 11-inch superslim laptop, but it's also a hybrid that converts to tablet mode. The mechanism is similar to the one found on Lenovo's popular Yoga series, with a lid that folds back 360 degrees.

Unlike the Yoga line, where the keyboard, while deactivated, is still clacking around under your fingers in tablet mode, the XPS 11 tries a different tack. In this case, the keyboard is actually almost entirely flat, with no moving parts. It's very similar to the touch keyboard option on the Microsoft Surface tablet, although in this case, the faux keys are raised a tiny bit higher.

It's an interesting concept, and one that helps the XPS 11 be even slimmer and lighter than either the Surface Pro 2 or the 11-inch Lenovo Yoga. But while the overall system design looks and feels great, the touch keyboard falls short in hands-on use. Even more so than on the Surface's touch keyboard, the lack of tactile feedback and the fact that keystrokes don't always register unless you really press down on the keys make it a hassle to be productive, which is the main selling point for using a Windows hybrid over a full-time tablet.

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