It’s comfortable to work on it. The 14-inch IPS touchscreen is crisp and very bright, yet it’s remarkably resistant to glare and fingerprints, and responds beautifully to my touch. My fingers fly around on its large keyboard like they were made for each other, and the trackpad works great. The keyboard deck has just the right slightly rubbery feel that lets my palms rest comfortably on it for long stretches.

Tough but attractive

The E7450 manages to be both pretty and rugged, its shell formed by the tough metal and carbon-composite material quickly gaining favor with higher-end PC makers. When I gripped the E7440 by the two ends and tried to twist it, it didn’t give one iota. Even the screen panel, a mere quarter-inch thick, barely flexed when I whipped the lid up by just its corner and snapped it shut again.

Dell says the machine has passed no fewer than 18 MIL-STD-810G tests, including being subjected to extreme heat and cold, high humidity, vibration, drops onto a hard surface, blowing sand and dust, and liquid spills on the keyboard.

To use it is to love it

The Latitude E7450 has a gorgeous, non-glare, 14-inch with native resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and the best off-axis viewing I’ve seen so far. The keyboard flexes in its middle and its keys bounce a little much, but they don’t clatter and they render nearly every keystroke correctly. The slightly concave keys are nicely islanded from each other, and offer just the right level of friction. Four levels of backlighting are available, which makes the computer easier to use and reduces the load on the battery when you don’t need its brightest settings.

Business Connections

Too many Ultrabook designers drop important ports in pursuit of ever-thinner profiles. The E7440 offers nearly everything you could ask for in a laptop this size, including hardwired Ethernet, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, an SD card reader, and three USB 3.0 ports.

Performance and battery life

Powered by an Intel Core i5-5300U processor, 4GB of DDR3L/1600 memory, and a 500GB SSD, the Latitude E7440 ran smoothly and cranked through basic tasks just fine. Just don’t expect it to rip through intense computational tasks like video rendering or playing AAA games—it’s not designed for those workloads.