Microsoft announced the brand new Surface Laptop 4 on Tuesday, but that wasn’t the only PC announcement of the day. Dell planned a few new notebook reveals of its own for April 13th, including an upgrade to its XPS 13 flagship that fans might have been anticipating. The high-end laptop is now available with an OLED display, which is the kind of notebook upgrade we’re expecting to go mainstream this year.
Samsung made a big deal about its OLED displays for laptops in early January, teasing that various devices will ship with the upgraded screen technology. It’s unclear, however, whether the new Dell XPS 13 rocks Samsung’s new OLED panel, but the display upgrade will be costly regardless of what company supplies it.
Dell announced the 2021 Inspiron family on Tuesday, which will include several models. The Inspiron 13 (starting at $599), Inspiron 14 (starting at $549.99), Inspiron 14 2-in-1 (starting at $729), Inspiron 15 (starting at $549.99), and Inspiron 16 Plus (starting at $949.99) offer buyers various price points for a brand new Windows 10 laptop. Each of them can be customized to meet the user’s needs with a choice of processors, RAM, and storage.
All the models feature the same near-borderless display, an “expansive keyboard” with larger keypads, and a spacious touchpad. The HD webcam comes with a new Temporal Noise Reduction feature to improve video quality. The laptops also come with ExpressCharge battery technology that recharges 80% of the battery in just an hour.
The Inspiron 16 Plus is one of the new Inspiron generation’s highlights, featuring a larger screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio. Dell says the display size was increased by 11% while the dimensions grew by just 5%. In other words, the notebook will be just slightly bigger than the Inspiron 15. Aside from the screen upgrade, the Plus will include Intel Core H-series processors, optional GTX or RTX discrete graphics, and a “robust thermal management system.”
The XPS 13 remains the pinnacle of Dell’s announcements. The laptop is virtually identical to the 9310 model that Dell launched in late 2020, but it can be configured with an OLED screen for an additional $300. The XPS 13 starts at $999.99 for the cheapest LCD model, but the cheapest OLED configuration on Dell’s website appears to be a model that costs $1,592.99 after 16% in savings. It comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The XPS 13 can be purchased on Dell’s website right now, with models shipping as soon as May 11th.
The OLED screen has a unique 3456 x 2160 resolution, which offers a 3.5K experience that sits in between the Full HD+ (1920 x 1200) and 4K UHD+ (3840 x 2400) resolution options available for the standard LCD models. The OLED screen supports 400-nit brightness, which is slightly lower than the 500 nits of the LCD models.
