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amazon Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet reviews
Except for battery life, you can skip the benchmark section of this review. Our usual performance scores, especially 3DMark graphics and gaming emulation, are irrelevant to the Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme. What matters is durability — this 11.6-inch Windows tablet is designed for use outside in squalid conditions, gets wet and falls out, and is used with gloves in the cold. It has an IP65 ingress protection rating, which means it’s immune to dust and sandstorms and water spray from most sprinklers, though not submersion in water. It’s bulky and heavy and ready to communicate over mobile broadband LTE when Wi-Fi is miles away. If Microsoft’s Surface Pro were exposed to gamma radiation and raged, it would be the Latitude 7220.
A muscular black stone
The 7220 is the successor to the Latitude 7212 Rugged Extreme; as of early 2020, it remains among the best durable laptops. It has similar dimensions of 0.96 x 12.3 x 8 inches, albeit a few ounces lighter at 1.3 kg without the optional keyboard cover. Like the 7212, it’s rated to last from -20 degrees F to 145 degrees F, able to withstand drops from 4 feet when turned off and 3 feet during use.
The $1,899 base model has a Core i3-8145U processor with 8GB of memory, a 128GB NVMe SSD, and Windows 10 Pro. The display is a full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) touchscreen with anti-glare, anti-smudge Gorilla Glass, and 1,000 nits brightness for use in the sun. There’s a 5-megapixel facial recognition webcam for Windows Hello login and an 8-megapixel rear camera.
For $3,197, my test device was piled up with options, including a 4-core Core i7-8665U chip, clocked at 1.9GHz (4.8GHz turbo), up to 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD (2TB top pick), backlit keyboard cover, active stylus, 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) instead of 802.11ac network. Qualcomm mobile broadband with AT&T SIM card and battery dual can be replaced directly. Dell also provides a sturdy handle and Havis vehicle dashboard base.
The dashboard is covered in matte black polycarbonate with rubber bumpers in the corners. Thick screen bezel. The sliding shutter on the top edge blocks the webcam if you’re worried about watching online, while the buttons below the screen let you brighten or dim the screen, increase or decrease the audio volume, and toggle auto-rotate between portrait and landscape or use programmable shortcuts. (Programming buttons and quick access to a variety of settings are provided by the Rugged Control Center utility or the on-screen taskbar that you download from Dell’s support website. Another utility allows you to configure the touchscreen for finger, glove, or rainy weather.)
The detachable kickstand, secured with a plastic screw with an anchor (a coin or thumbnail will do if you don’t have a screwdriver), secures the tablet at almost any angle. There is absolutely no oscillation if you touch the screen while it is cradled. The keyboard cover magnetically latches onto the tablet’s bottom edge, although its hold is too weak for you to pick up a regular keyboard. It folds up to cover the screen.
Use and Abuse
The ports on the right edge of the Latitude 7220 (when you hold the tablet in landscape mode) are hidden by tight-fitting covers. These include one AC adapter connector, one mini RS-232 serial port for data acquisition devices, one USB type C port with DisplayPort functionality, one USB 3.1 type A port with device charging, a microSD card slot, and an audio jack. A Kensington security lock slot is located on the left side. You won’t find an HDMI, Ethernet, or Thunderbolt 3 port.
A passive stylus, secured by an elastic waistband, fits into a recess on the top edge. On the side of the tablet are a fingerprint reader, a SmartCard reader, a slide to cover the rear camera lens, and two 34WHr batteries, which you can remove and swap when the stand is removed.
The front and rear cameras default to 1080p but can capture fairly bright and sharp images at a resolution of 2,592 x 1,944 and 3,264 x 2,448, respectively. You won’t use the Rugged Extreme Tablet as a boom box as you walk through warehouses or disaster zones. Still, its single speaker can deliver relatively loud and clear audio, which can be a bit overwhelming empty but even allows me to hear overlapping tracks in my MP3.
The screen offers ample brightness and contrast — raised all the way, it’s certainly washed out somewhat in direct outdoor sunlight, but it’s still clear. Used indoors or after dark, it’s fun to look at, with a dazzling white background and crisp text. Colors don’t stand out exactly but are clear and well saturated, and small details look sharp.
Because it’s designed to work even when you’re wearing gloves, the Latitude’s touch screen forces you to press harder and pull more slowly than you might be used to with tablets or laptops. The same goes for the small two-button touchpad of the keyboard case. But with practice, both work pretty well. I only experienced a little lag and palm marking when using the tethered passive pen, but nothing was unacceptable. Users anticipating a lot of pen input might want to try the battery-powered PN720R active pen that Dell sent, which kept up with my fastest strokes and scribbles with the ability to refuse to please.
Other tablets with a kickstand and keyboard cover, the 7220 is happier and balances better on a desk or a table than in your lap. That said, Dell’s $349.99 price tag is above average, with four levels of RGB backlighting with customizable colors. Top row keys like Escape and Delete are small, and you have to combine the Fn key with the left and right cursor arrows for Home and End (although there are dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys). But typing feels surprisingly good, with adequate travel and responsiveness.
The high-pressure hose will submerge it when submerged or submerged, but the Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet remains undeterred by splashes, spills, or heavy rain. I ran it under the kitchen faucet, and nothing bad happened; I didn’t even need to summon the home screen widget and select wet rather than normal touch.
I dropped the shutdown tablet onto its back and sides several times from about 4 feet for another type of spill. It started up and ran fine each time, so I dropped it from about three feet while it was running. That didn’t hurt it either, although the keyboard cover did come off once. I wouldn’t recommend running through the tablet with a truck or throwing it against a rock wall, but it’s ready to go with first responders on the scene. Indeed, its mobile data link is compatible with the FirstNet private network for first responders and its preferred Band 14 spectrum.
where can you get a Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet online
Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Tablet, 11.6″ FHD Touch Outdoor-Readable, Intel Core i7-8665U (1.90 GHz, Quad-Core), 16GB RAM, M.2 512GB SSD NVMe, Windows 10 Pro: Buy it now
Performance
The Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme’s best-known competitor as a rugged detachable tablet is the Panasonic Toughbook 33, which we tested in October 2017 using an older set of benchmarks. I cannot provide a direct comparison here. Instead, I opted for two rugged laptops that share its almost unbeatable IP65 rating: Both Panasonic’s Toughbook 31 and Dell’s Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme are built to withstand falls 6 meters long. The other two places in our benchmark chart go to Lenovo and Microsoft’s more unlikely, lighter tablets.
Except for gamers and an even less likely audience of music enthusiasts, the 7220 proves to be a high performer (so strong that I doubt most customers will be satisfied with Core i5 rather than my Core i7 configuration).
PCMark 10 and 8 are performance suites developed by benchmarking experts at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test simulates various real-world productivity and content creation workflows for office-focused tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, and video conferencing. Meanwhile, PCMark 8 has a storage sub-test to gauge the system’s boot drive speed.
It’s not destined to see many Excel and PowerPoint tasks, but the Dell tablet easily hit the 4,000 marks that we consider excellent in PCMark 10, and its SSD joined the others PCMark 8 storage measurements.
Next is the test of Cinebench R15, which handles Maxon’s CPU, using all available cores and threads while rendering a complex image. It delivers a score that shows the PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Microsoft’s Surface Pro 7 excels here, but the 7220 is so much more. It went on to win our Handbrake video-editing exercise, CPU-dependent multithreading, in which we set a timer on the systems as they transcoded a long 4K video 12 minutes to 1080p MP4 file.
We used the Creative Cloud 2018 release of image-editing favorite Adobe Photoshop to apply a complex series of 10 filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image in another timed test.
The Rugged Extreme tablet has once again won a gold medal. Field workers and first responders may not be using it to manage their photo collections, but they will certainly use its rear camera to take photos at work or incident sites, then attach the keyboard cover to write the report.
3DMark measures relative graphics engines by rendering a variety of highly detailed gaming-style animations. The 3DMark sub-tests we ran, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but the latter is more demanding and allows systems with dedicated graphics to control the content.
The Dell slate has joined many of the laptops we’ve tested with integrated Intel graphics — in other words; its scores are pathetically low compared to what’s needed for serious gaming.
Followed by another composite graphics test. Like 3DMark, Unigine Corp’s Superposition test renders and shoots through detailed 3D footage, in this case using the 720p and 1080p low resolution and image quality presets. These scores are reported in frames per second (fps), with a minimum of 30 fps for smooth gameplay and more than 60 fps desirable.
After fully charging the tablet or laptop, we set it up in power-saving mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode), turned off Wi-Fi, and did some tweaking other battery savers in preparation to unplug the rundown test. We then loop through a 720p video file with the screen brightness set at 50 percent and the volume at 100 percent until the system connects.
Its dual batteries keep the Dell 7220 tablet running for an impressive 17 hours. (Even with only one battery in, this panel can last for a considerable nine hours and is subject to change.) With the screen brightness turned on, real-world usage will be quicker, but you can safely take this tablet with no AC outlet.