XPS 15 l502x Review

What I got
I got mine from the outlet, and it was a scratch n dent unit:
i5-2520m
4GB RAM
1920x1080 FHD B+RGLED screen
500GB 7200RPM hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1GB
DVD-RW drive
Wireless-N 1000
6-cell battery (came with 9-cell)
Back-lit keyboard
Windows 7 Professional
Price (after $100 coupon) $649 +tax

I've heard many people say that they receive scratch n dents with no visible damage. No luck here, mine had a very visible 3-4" scratch on the cover. The rest of the laptop looks new, though.
The laptop also came with a 9-cell battery, when the specs said 6-cell. So overall, I was happy with the deal I got.

Build Quality
This thing feels very solid. The cover is clearly a plastic with metallic paint. The palmrest, though, appears to be actual aluminum and does have a high-end feel to it. It's certainly not a flashy looking laptop, but it looks nice, a bit better than it looks in pictures. The 9-cell battery gives a nice little elevation to the rear when it's on a desk, however when it's on your lap it might dig into your legs after a while.

Ports
I have a complaint about the power port. It's in the back of the laptop, and if you're sitting back in a comfy chair and want to put your knees up, the power cord gets in the way. I think the power port should have been on the side and I think the jack should have been the right-angle type, instea of this one that sticks straight out. There is a right-angle adapter available that I'll be ordering.

I've also noticed an issue with the USB ports. Even though the connection feels pretty solid, I've had my portable hard drive lose connection a couple times just from moving it around a little. The connector hadn't come out or come loose, but just from the cord being jiggled the connection was lost for a split second and I hear the sound of a device being unplugged/replugged. It's not a deal-breaker, and I'll just be careful with my drive.

Keyboard
I really like the backlit keyboard and I think this is a feature all users should demand for in a laptop, even lower end models. Certainly all mid to high-end laptops should be coming with backlit keyboards. I also like the feel of the chiclet keyboard a lot, and I would not go back to a standard keyboard after using this. Finally, there is very little flex in the keyboard.

Touchpad
The surface of the pad feels nice and the buttons have a wonderful feel to them (coming fron an ASUS netbook with the rocker button, this is worlds better). However, I've noticed more jumpiness to this trackpad than my netbook. It also requires a harder tap for clicking without the button. In my opinion the 1-finger side scrolling option in the touchpad settings works great, and much better that the 2-finger scrolling. Overall, the touchpad is just ok. It would be great if not for the cursor jumping around quite a bit.


Speakers
Do the speakers live up to the hype? Yes, and no. They certainly are fantastic speakers for a laptop. I think I took in a little too much of the hype, though. I remember reading someone saying that the XPS 15 could replace a stereo system. Well, they are not quite that good. The sound fidelity and loudness is not up to the level of a stand alone stereo system. You could fill a small room with the sound from this laptop, but not a big room.

LCD Screen
No doubt about it, the screen is gorgeous. It's as good as my previous NEC 20wmgx2, which I think is one of the best ever made. The NEC is an IPS panel, but the viewing angles on the XPS FHD screen are nearly as good. So really great viewing angles for a TN panel. It's also quite bright, and most people will probably only need to keep it at 2/3 brightness at most.

Now, the colors. I had heard about the excessive color saturation, and was worried about that. Well, I can say now that it's not much of an issue. The colors are certainly very saturated, and some colors can look almost neon compared to what we're used to seeing on low gamut screens. The main thing I was concerned about was that skin tones in pictures were going to be all shifted to red. It does happen, but it's not an across-the-board thing. In some pictures where the skin tone already had a reddish tone, yes it will look even more pronounced on this screen, and won't look so nice. So far I've only noticed this on maybe 15-20% of images. I haven't done any color adjustment yet, and I think that can tone the saturation down a bit. Even without any color adjustment, I could get used to the vibrant colors.

The other issue I was worried about is the 1080P resolution on a screen this size possibly being too much. Well, after using it for a couple days, I can say that it's not a big problem but it is an issue. The system comes by default with the Windows scaling set to 125%. I tried setting it to 100% and the text is so tiny, I think anyone who claims to use these at 100% either has freakishly good eyesight, has their screen 5 inches away from their nose, or is just lying. So us mere mortals will use the screen at 125%, and there are no real issues with that except that you will occasionally see some text that doesn't fit quite right in some applications, and you will see some icons and other images that don't look quite right. Most of us will also need to increase the zoom in our browsers unless, again, you are comfortable reading very tiny text. I view most web sites at 120%. It's not really a problem, but again you will notice the images being scaled up and they won't look quite as sharp as you're used to.

Overall, the 1080P resolution is ok, but in my opinion for a screen this size the optimal resolution would be something like 1600x900, at least for people who are not so concerned about watching blu-ray movies at full resolution. I think for everyday computer usage in Windows, 1600x900 would be a better trade off between the tiny text and still having enough pixels, while allowing you to stay with 100% scaling in Windows. Hopefully one day we will get an operating system that can handle high resolution screens better, allowing the OS and apps to be scaled properly to your own liking without any loss of quality. Until then, just be aware the there are some drawbacks to having such a high resolution on a relatively small laptop screen.

Performance
I'm not gonna say much about this... I think we all know that these laptops have more than enough power for most people. I wanted the quad core originally, but I decided to save a little money with the dual core, and I think it's plenty for me. Video encoding is about the most CPU intensive thing I do, and this laptop is extremely fast at encoding. I've also tried the Quick Sync hardware encoding, and it's unbelievably fast. Hopefully we will see more encoding/transcoding apps adding support for this feature.

I do plan to add an SSD eventually, but to be honest, the 7200RPM hard drive feels fast enough already. I'm really not waiting for much of anything with this laptop. I was using a netbook before this, so the performance of this XPS is like night and day compared to that.

Battery Life
Battery life with the 9-cell is quite good. With the screen at ~2/3 brightness and using the balanced power plan, I can get around 5 hours of general use, mostly web browsing. I'm happy with the battery life.

Bloatware?
I don't really understand why people complain about this and take their time doing clean installs. There was barely anything installed on mine, just a few programs like McCaffee, Roxio, PowerDVD, and Adobe Reader (all easy to remove if you want). Also there are some minor Dell customizations to control panels and such, all useful stuff.

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I'll stop here, and if I think of anything else I'll come back and add it. Overall I'm quite happy with this purchase and I would recommend the XPS 15. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close.