DELL Refurbished Dell E7250 Core i5 4GB RAM 256GB SSD - Black

  If you don't mind sacrificing screen space for a more portable design, Dell's new Latitude E7250 is an enticing portable workstation. The business notebook comes with a compact, 12.5-inch screen, plus a durable design, a comfy keyboard, good security features and all the ports you could ask for in a work laptop. 

Design

The Latitude E7250 sports a simple, understated design, and that's a good thing. Its magnesium-alloy chassis comes with a matte-black finish that will look right at home in a business meeting. The lid, meanwhile, sports a woven carbon-fiber texture that's a bit more interesting to look at than the smooth finish on Lenovo's ThinkPad notebooks. Likewise, the E7250's tapered edges give it a more streamlined look than that of a boxy ThinkPad.

Display

The E7250's 12.5-inch display is a bit smaller than what you'll find on the average 13-inch consumer laptop, but it's still sharp and spacious enough for everyday productivity tasks. The 1,920 x 1,080-pixel panel on our review unit produced crisp, clean text, though colors are a bit muted. On the bright side, it delivers a whopping 360 nits of brightness at its highest setting, which is significantly higher than the category average of 255 nits

Keyboard and touchpad

A great business notebook should come with a great keyboard, and the E7250 doesn't disappoint on that front. The notebook's keys offer a generous 1.8mm of travel, which is noticeably deeper than the average laptop's 1.5mm of travel. That's a perk for business users, since deeper keys generally mean a more comfortable, desktoplike typing experience. The E7250's keys feel nice and snappy, too, with a good amount of feedback on each keystroke; no mushy key presses here.

The 3.9 x 2-inch touchpad is a bit on the small side for my taste. It features discrete buttons instead of built-in buttons, which allows for more-precise right clicks than you'd get on a touchpad with built-in buttons. On the other hand, the dedicated buttons reduce the amount of overall space available for pointer navigation.

Pointer navigation feels responsive, and multi-finger gestures like two-finger scrolling also work well. I don't love the matte-plastic finish of the touchpad, though; my finger glides more easily on pads with a softer finish.

Ports and connectivity

Every port you could want on a business notebook is here. That includes three USB 3.0 ports, including one with PowerShare functionality, handy for charging your smartphone while your notebook is in sleep mode.

The back of the notebook houses an HDMI port and a mini DisplayPort for connecting to a larger monitor, or linking your notebook to a projector for a presentation. There's also an SD card reader to expand your internal storage, and an Ethernet port for connecting to wired Internet and secure company networks.

Security

Business users will appreciate the extra security features included with the E7250. That includes Dell's Data Protection software, which lets you set secure encryption policies for your system. The notebook also comes with full hard-drive encryption via Microsoft's BitLocker. Meanwhile, a smart card reader on the notebook's left edge will let you configure the machine to require a physical card to verify your security credentials.

It's possible to order the E7250 with a fingerprint reader, though my review unit didn't come with one, so I wasn't able to test this add-on's reliability. The upgrade costs just $14, though, so I recommend that business users go for it. Fingerprint readers are handy for keeping your work laptop locked down, since fingerprints are more secure than passwords.