Dell’s Inspiron Duo is a netbook with a capacitive touchscreen meant to bridge the gap between tablets and netbooks. Many people, myself included, have been looking for a laptop solution with tablet qualities, but the major setback has been with Windows. Microsoft has for years built operating systems capable of supporting tablets and touchscreens, but those controls have always been secondary to standard computing UI, meaning the keyboard and mouse. Of course, Apple changed tablets forever by succeeding with the iPhone, and then the iPad.
The Inspiron Duo, behind the iPad and Galaxy TabletThe Duo comes built with a 1.5GHz dual core Atom processor, 2GB of RAM and integrated graphics. This may sound fast for a netbook, but as I will show later on the Duo is still sluggish. When I first started the Duo, I wanted to reformat the netbook to wipe out the extraneous bloatware, but couldn’t because doing so would also remove the touch software – dubbed Dell Stage – along with all the bad.
Inspiron Duo on the bottom is easily 3 times as thick as the iPad, and heavier than both true tabletsTouchscreen
The first thing I noticed about the touchscreen is that it needed to be calibrated. Unlike most tablets, Windows requires calibration to read touch presses accurately. Dell even saw fit to enlarge the display 125% so that users would be able to use the touch display more precisely. Once I realized this (the screen looked odd, but, well, the whole laptop is awkwardly designed compared to regular netbooks), I immediately changed it back because the pixels on-screen just didn’t look right. As though the screen resolution were wrong, everything looked slightly skewed and stretched.
Once calibrated, the touchscreen works extremely well. Its pinpoint accurate, the 10.1” screen is smooth and flows easily. The technology behind the touchscreen seems to work as well as any other touchscreen…but the software behind it is a big letdown.
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Anyone familiar with Windows-based touchpads knows that the software was built specifically for two things: to be used with a keyboard and mouse, touch gestures second; and to be used with a stylus for touchscreens. This was how Bill Gates envisioned it over two decades ago and how Windows 7 was built on top of. That is, in my experience, the core of Windows for touch controls.
Knowing this, Windows 7 on a machine like the Duo makes the Duo suffer. In many respects, I could never replace an iPad with the Duo. In other words, the Duo may look and act like a tablet, but it isn’t a tablet. It uses software that’s still based on a premise that no longer exists today. The Duo will always be a tablet PC. Anyone interested in replacing their current tablet, or who wants to get a tablet but with all the added benefits of a full-fledged laptop, should really define what it is they want in a device before making that purchase decision.
Aside from the touch capabilities of the screen, the viewing angles on the Duo are retched. Built with tablets in mind, one would assume viewing angles, which are so pertinent to today’s smartphones and tablets, would be a highlight for the Duo. One would be wrong. Tilt the screen too far or sit at too high an angle and the colors invert. Turn a bit too far to the right or left, and the screen, or at least part of it, won’t look right. Actually showing video to multiple people, or even watching alone, requires setting up the Duo in a sweet spot.
The whole issue with the screen is far worse when thinking about sharing pictures or video. I once used the iPad to make an introduction instead of a projector, just a month after its release, and the results were exceptional. With the Duo however, the viewing angle is too poor to take into the field. Business users interested in wowing their audiences will not find that oomph in the Duo.
General Use and Performance
When Dell first announced the Duo, I told my brother to hold off on buying an iPad. He was going to buy one to watch video on, wasn’t interested in paying for Hulu+. For him and similar users, Duo is a smart choice because it will stream any media, no matter what major media conglomerates say. After all, it’s still a laptop. That is perhaps the best thing about the Duo, that you can watch streaming video on it as if it were a tablet, with all the benefits of using a laptop.
The left side of the Duo, which has the flip-open USB and 3.5mm auxiliary ports…
And the right side, even emptier than the left with just the power buttonThe Duo has just 2 USB ports, a single 3.5mm auxiliary port for stereo sound, and the power connector. No VGA/HDMI out, no Ethernet port, no media card reader…we get bubkis. On my first day playing with the Duo, I wanted to show a video on the big screen and couldn’t. Wi-Fi only means even at home data transfer speeds are throttled at whatever your wireless network can handle. Furthermore, the actually included connectors have flip-open plastic covers for protection but instead they get in the way.
Using a laptop fulltime with just 2 USB ports is difficult, though having access to the touchscreen does eliminate the need for a dedicated mouse. As I did months ago with the iPad, scrolling up and down websites and applications with my fingers and typing on a keyboard, I could now scroll – albeit less comfortably by dragging the scroll bar up and down – instead of relying on the middle mouse scroll wheel. In fact, all of the main mouse functions can be achieved using the touchscreen. Right clicking uses the same three-second gesture to activate as it does on Microsoft’s Kinect: hold for three seconds and the left click becomes a right click. This is a slow process, and it’s more convenient to just use the touchpad’s buttons instead.
Even an episode of Castle is ruined thanks to the poor viewing angles on the DuoOne larger concern in general use I’ve had is not the screen size, but the multiple bezels. Like all smartphones, the glass and screen are separated by a slight black region of glass. On the Duo, that amounts to another square inch to the entire glass plate. Then the actual frame, the true bezel, adds another square inch. The 10.1” screen looks tiny when compared to the larger build, like there’s a 10” screen on a 13” laptop. This gives users a larger perceived size of the display, in effect making the laptop look huge and the screen tiny.
Forgive me for sounding like Jeff Foxworthy, but you can tell a computer runs slow when it takes a full 10 seconds for the Windows search bar to find Word. There are load times for everything, from Office applications to loading webpages. Yes, even some heavier websites run slowly because the hardware needs extra time to process it. Physically turning the Duo to portrait mode takes anywhere from 4-7 seconds to switch over completely. Saving documents takes just as long. Some high quality 480p video and average quality 720p video will stutter, and is unwatchable.
That is to say, if you require the performance an average netbook can offer, the Duo is a little behind. If, however, you plan to use it as a media and viewing device, so long as you don’t expect anything higher than DVD quality video there won’t be a problem, just a delay.
Battery Life
Performance on the Duo is mediocre, and sometimes tragic. Netbooks, in my opinion, don’t offer enough to warrant a purchase, especially when compared to recent inexpensive ultraportable notebooks. However, the key differentiator in such an argument is battery life. No ultraportable can boast the 8-12 hour battery life some netbooks can, and a 10-15% drop in performance is worth the extended use. Who wouldn’t want to compute throughout an entire transatlantic flight?
The Duo seriously fails on both sides of this argument, taking the maximum drop in performance and offering a measly joke for battery life.
My average battery life of the Duo over a course of three weeks of testing averages between two to three and a half hours, depending on use. I can’t sit in a café and watch a whole movie over Wi-Fi. It couldn’t last through the entire Superbowl while word processing. Battery life just stinks. Everyone claims they buy tablets and netbooks for the apps, the small size, usability…but the reality is for battery life. Swap ten hours with five and nobody will buy that netbook or tablet. So what the hell happened with the Duo?
The main point for battery life is this: it’s no tablet and no netbook when it comes to battery life. At best, you’ll be able to squeeze out three and a half hours with minimal Wi-Fi use and the lowest screen brightness. At worst, with heavy Wi-Fi and media use (such as streaming video) and average brightness, two hours. For a netbook or tablet, battery life on the Duo is an absolute failure.
Docking Station
The JBL dock is a convenient way to plug in the Duo while showing off its better quality, the touchscreen. The irony in this case is that, as mentioned earlier, Windows 7 just doesn’t handle a touch-only interface well which somewhat limits just how functional the Duo is using just the touchscreen.
My final thoughts on the docking station for the Dell Inspiron Duo is the following: If the Duo is going to be your sole laptop and you’d like better audio when at home, get the docking station. If not, pass on it. The extra USB ports and memory card reader don’t help without external monitor support, and having a faster internet connection through cabled Ethernet is not worth the $100 laptop stand.
Conclusion
The Dell Inspiron Duo has a lot of promise. So much promise that I told several friends to wait for it before buying a tablet. And it does have many great uses. I couldn’t watch half of my favorite shows in coffee shops, the office or anywhere else on a tablet-like device except for the Duo. There really is something so convenient about just turning the laptop upside down and having the screen out in front so I can sit back and enjoy the show, instead of hunching over like we all do with our laptops to see better. I like the touchscreen and being able to scroll, quickly tap on windows, and use certain gestures. It’s a brave new world and Dell has certainly pushed forward in an excellent direction.
But the company bit off more than it could chew. Windows 7 simply isn’t ready to compete with Android and iOS, let alone for the upcoming Blackberry Playbook tablet or Android’s soon-to-be-released firmware upgrade specifically for tablets, 3.0. Even just comparing Windows 7 against the 10-month old iPad puts Microsoft’s beloved operating system to shame. Dell clearly had little choice if they wanted to include the best features of a regular netbook with the touch capabilities of a tablet.
Dell is, however, responsible for the preposterous battery life and slower-than-life processing. At $550, the Duo is certainly competitively priced with tablets, but if anyone walked into a Best Buy and tried the Duo, they would walk away instantly. The Duo isn’t smooth, it isn’t fast, and in nearly every way pales in comparison to older, less powerful hardware. There are plenty of people who would be happy to pay double the price for a more powerful, faster machine, but it’s clear the company was aiming for a certain price point. Because of this, the Duo is seriously handicapped against even the weakest of competitors.
All that would be secondary if the battery life were at least three times as long as it’s current minimum, two hours. With at least six hours of battery life, the poor performance could be overlooked. After all, we all want to continue typing or touching away. But the Duo can’t even stream a 2+ hour movie. Slow performance and awful battery life are such major setbacks that it makes the terrible viewing angles almost insignificant.
I have no doubt that the Dell Inspiron Duo will live on as a stepping stone for other, similar devices in the future. Even today, typing this review on the Duo, people asked in wonder about the rotating screen and how it works. There is something magical about it that attracts the eye. For now, however, it’s best to leave it as a fond memory and to look forward to what the future will bring
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