Dell Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme Review

Design and Features

The Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme$4,705.75 at Dell is sturdily built for soldiers on the battlefield and other active users, like police and fire departments. The tank-like construction is similar to the Dell Latitude E6420 XFR$1,771.00 at Dell, though this is a newer chassis. It is a fully ruggedized laptop, and meant to survive harsher environments than the semi-rugged Dell Latitude E6430 ATG$3,655.75 at Dell. Its chassis measures a beefy 9.75 by 14 by 2 inches (HWD) and weighs 8.39 pounds.

When all of the latches and doors are buttoned up, there is no chance for dust, snow, water, or even inadvertent prods from steel tools to get lodged in the system's I/O ports. Each port door has a two-step latch: a sliding lock, which doesn't have to be held to disengage, and a pull latch, which does. These doors hide a plethora of ports, including a DVD burner, two Ethernet ports, an ExpressCard reader, an HDMI port, a power connector, an SD card reader, two serial ports, a Smart Card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a VGA port. Doors also allow access to the system's modular SSD/hard drive bay and battery bay. This means that you could swap out your drive and pass the laptop on to a colleague to use with their own modular drive. Built-in 4G LTE with GPS and a larger 512GB SSD are available as options for about $1,000 more than the configuration we tested.

A docking device connector on the bottom of the chassis is compatible with a desk dock or one mounted in a vehicle. The new dock isn't compatible with Dell's older ATG and XFR laptops, but works with the semi-rugged Dell Latitude 14 Rugged and fully ruggedized Latitude 12 Rugged Extreme laptop lines. A sturdy handle on the leading edge of the laptop lets you grab the system off the ground while you're accelerating to a full sprint, or retrieve it from a vehicle in a second. There's an NFC reader under the palm rest and a biometric reader for secure computing. A compact stylus sits in its own compartment, attached to the system with a lanyard.

The 14-inch 1,366-by-768 touch screen may seem to have a low resolution in this day and age, but it is a unique panel for a variety of reasons. Software used in the fire, military, and police fields is designed for quick information retrieval, so it's unlikely that a soldier under fire will need a 1080p screen to look at multipage spreadsheets. Rather, they will likely be using a simple touch-based interface to read weather reports or route communications. To that end, the touch screen uses resistive single-point touch functionality, so you can interact with it even with a gloved hand. Capacitive multitouch screens, on the other hand, require specialized gloves with metal woven into the fingertips.

The screen acts like a single button mouse: You can click and drag, but you can't pinch to zoom or right-click. The Windows operating system treats the display like a mouse as well. The System Control Panel doesn't recognize it as a touch device (which has to have at least five points of touch for Windows 8 to acknowledge it). The rugged touchpad is also a single-touch device, with two physical mouse buttons for clicks. The tech isn't all vintage, though. The screen has full daylight visibility, which is important when you're using it outdoors the majority of the time.

The Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme is fully certified and tested to meet IP65 and MIL-STD-810G standards, which govern durability. The IP65 certification essentially means that the system is impervious to dust and particle intrusion, as well as water spraying at the closed port doors and exposed portions of the laptop. The MIL-STD-801G certification ensures that the system can survive drops, outdoor environmental effects, temperature swings, and severe vibration from riding in vehicles on rough terrain. It's not indestructible, but it's more likely to survive a battlefield environment than laptops like the Dell Precision M2800$1,740.30 at Dell or the HP EliteBook Folio 1040 G1 (G4U67UT)$1,670.92 at Amazon. Drops, kicks, and vibrations from vehicles are unlikely to damage the system beyond cosmetic scratches. The system comes with a three-year warranty.

Performance

Our review unit comes with a 1.9GHz Intel Core i5-4300U processor and Nvidia GeForce GT 720M graphics. The components are several generations newer than those on the previously tested rugged laptops like the Dell Latitude E6420 XFR and the Panasonic Toughbook CF-31$3,199.99 at Amazon, so we can't directly compare performance to the older systems, but we can compare laptops with similar parts. The Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme received a very good score of 3,136 points on the PCMark Work Conventional test, almost on par with the Dell M2800 and much faster than the HP 1040 G1.

Multimedia scores are also competitive, since the Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme only took 4 minutes 19 seconds to complete the Handbrake video encoding test, and 4:39 to finish the Photoshop CS6 test. The Photoshop score is close to that of the Dell M2800 (3:58), but the Intel Core i7 CPU in the Dell M2800 helped it leapfrog the other systems by several minutes.

On our battery rundown test, the Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme beat out those performance-oriented laptops, lasting an impressive 11 hours 25 minutes. It means that the system will last through the daylight hours of just about any day of the year. The HP 1040 G1 managed just 7:20 on the same test.

Our Editors' Choice for rugged laptops was the semi-rugged Dell Latitude E6430 ATG, but it is clear that the Dell Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme surpasses it. Panasonic still makes a fully rugged Toughbook 31, but it uses older processors that are less efficient than the fourth generation Intel Core i5 in the Latitude 14. We'd like to see multitouch screen functionality in a rugged laptop sometime soon, but for now, the Dell Latitude 14 Rugged Extreme shows that it is robust enough and modern enough to become our top pick if you need a tough-as-nails notebook.