Dell Latitude 9330 2-in-1 Review

We’re not sure which of our notebook roundups the Dell Latitude 9330 2-in-1 (starts at $1,969; $2,619.63 as tested) will end up in: It’s a business laptop that’s also a convertible that’s also an ultraportable. In whichever category, this Latitude is a relatively costly—on an individual level—but classy compact 2-in-1 laptop with speedy performance and helpful features. If you can live with a 13.3-inch screen rather than most enterprise laptops’ 14-inch displays, the Latitude 9330 2-in-1 is a versatile business convertible for the modern workplace. That said, it’s not quite enough to oust current Editors’ Choice award holders among business 2-in-1s, notably the Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6.

The Littlest Latitude 

The humblest 9330 2-in-1 we can configure on Dell’s website is $1,969 with an Intel Core i5-1230U processor, a skimpy 8GB of memory, and a 256GB solid-state drive. While a sharp panel, the only available display is a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel IPS touch screen. Our $2,619.63 test unit steps up to a Core i7-1260U chip (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads) with Intel’s vPro IT management capabilities, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Conservatively clad in gray aluminum, the Latitude 9330 2-in-1 measures a trim 0.55 by 11.7 by 8.2 inches and limbos under the ultraportable line at 2.8 pounds. A 14-inch rival, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7, is 0.61 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches and 3.04 pounds. A convertible with a 3:2 aspect ratio display, the HP Spectre x360 13.5, is 0.67 by 11.7 by 8.7 inches and 3.01 pounds.

Dell’s display bezels are slim—Dell claims a 90% screen-to-body ratio—and there’s virtually no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. On a related note, this 2-in-1 has passed MIL-STD 810H tests against travel hazards like shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. You may not use the power button, since the system switches on as you open the lid, but it doubles as a fingerprint reader, joining the IR face recognition webcam to give you two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello. (Windows 11 Pro comes installed standard.)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

This Latitude’s svelte shape doesn’t leave much room for ports. Two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports decorate the left side, while a USB-C 3.2 port joins a 3.5mm audio jack and security lock slot on the right. The compact AC adapter has a USB-C connector.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

In the absence of an HDMI port, you’ll need a DisplayPort dongle for an external monitor, though there’s a USB Type-C-to-A adapter in the box to plug in legacy accessories. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle cordless communications, with 4G ($197) or 5G ($230) mobile broadband options on offer if you often wander out of range of Wi-Fi hotspots.

Added Value for Video Calls 

Dell’s webcam offers 1080p instead of the bare minimum 720p resolution and can blur your background (giving you pixelated sharp edges) if you like. It captures well-lit and clear images without static but gives my face a slightly greenish tint. Instead of a sliding privacy shutter, the F4 and F9 keys toggle the microphone and camera, respectively. In addition to face recognition, the webcam can act as a proximity sensor to lock and unlock the PC as you leave and return, blur the screen if it detects someone looking over your shoulder, and dim it if you look away.

Quad speakers (two top-firing, two bottom-firing) produce sound loud enough to fill a conference room, and while it’s a bit hollow or boomy at top volume, the audio is crisp and clear. There’s a welcome bit of bass, and it’s easy to make out overlapping tracks.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

As for inputs, the backlit keyboard has a shallow but snappy typing feel. It has dedicated Home and End keys on the top row, although Page Up and Page Down require you to pair the Fn key with the up and down cursor arrows. The arrows, alas, are hard-to-hit, half-size keys stacked between full-size left and right arrows in an awkward HP-style row instead of the proper inverted T. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and has a comfortable click.

Dell’s pre-loaded Optimizer utility is also a mixed bag. It annoys me with its sluggish loading, as well as its “Processing request, please wait” messages, and frequent requests for feedback. However, it offers handy control of power options and presence detection, and enables you to combine wired and wireless networks for faster downloads. It also holds court over noise cancellation for video conferences, and governs the icons that appear on the touchpad for camera and mic control, screen share, and chat during calls with the Zoom desktop client. If you spend your days in video calls, you’ll appreciate some subset of what it handles.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The touch display has the increasingly popular, slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio instead of the familiar 16:9. Its 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution produces sharp details. Viewing angles are wide and contrast is deep. Colors are well saturated, though only moderately vivid rather than pop-off-the-screen bold. Brightness, however, is exceptional, with snow-white instead of dingy backgrounds.

Testing the Dell Latitude 9330 2-in-1: Four Executives and a Civilian 

For our benchmark charts, we compared the Dell with three other business laptops. Two are convertibles with slightly bigger 14-inch screens, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 (starts at $1,589.40; $2,456.99 as tested) and the Asus ExpertBook B7 Flip ($2,149.99). One is a 13.3-inch clamshell, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 (starts at $1,151.40; $1,337.40 as tested). That left one slot for our favorite consumer convertible, the HP Spectre x360 13.5 (starts at $1,149.99; $1,749.99 as tested). This undercuts the Latitude’s price despite a snazzy OLED screen, because it lacks business credentials, like vPro manageability and MIL-STD 810H sturdiness.

Productivity Tests 

Our main benchmark for testing productivity capability is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Finally, Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Latitude passes the important tests, easily clearing the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that spell excellent productivity for everyday apps like Word and Excel. However, it lands toward the middle-back of the pack in terms of raw horsepower, as evidenced by its Geekbench, Handbrake, and Cinebench scores. It’s not a smart choice for video editing (few 13.3-inch ultraportables are) or crunching workstation-sized datasets, but it’s a fine daily driver for office duties. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

To further push laptops’ graphics chops, we also run the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation, respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Next to last in most tests, the 9330 2-in-1 is clearly suited only for casual gaming and video viewing, not high-end games or video editing. It’s no surprise, since all five tested laptops’ integrated graphics are light years away from the performance of a gaming laptop’s dedicated GPU.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

To further measure a display’s quality, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Clearly, this Latitude can’t match the wide color gamut of the Spectre x360’s OLED panel, but Dell’s IPS display is the brightest in the group when cranked all the way up, and above average for mainstream productivity tasks. The Dell bests only the ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 in battery life, but it should get you through a full day of work—plus an evening of Netflix—with no trouble.

Verdict: A Chic, Corporate Compact Convertible

The Latitude 9330 2-in-1 comes very close to earning an Editors’ Choice award among business convertible laptops, though its ultraportable form factor and emphasis on videoconferencing aims it at frequent fliers and flex workers rather than office-bound executives. We’re reserving the honor because we’d like to see more than one screen option, and it’s a little short on ports—we strongly prefer native HDMI ports to USB-C dongles for connecting a monitor, and an Ethernet port would be nice for Dell’s ingenious wired/wireless network aggregation. But staffers whose companies deploy the 9330 will be pleased with their choice.