Review: Dell Inspiron 14 Plus — a snappy Snapdragon laptop

The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus is a Snapdragon-powered laptop, Dell’s first foray into the world of Snapdragon X chipsets. Although it has taken a while to arrive, it is worth the wait. It is perfect for those who need a PC laptop that can churn through work without any hiccups.

While the Inspiron 14 Plus is not the first Snapdragon X laptop on the market, it is certainly one to consider if you are looking for a laptop with multiple days of battery life and the power and AI promised by the Snapdragon X chipsets.

Design + hardware

There is nothing fancy about the Inspiron 14 Plus laptop, and I’m here for it. It has a standard laptop keyboard without any gimmicky capacitive buttons. In fact, the keyboard is one of its best features. The keys have a soft feel and decent travel, making typing on them a pleasurable experience, even for extended periods of time.

The top right of the keyboard houses the power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor.  Works quickly and accurately although I much prefer the Windows Hello camera.

The display is an IPS QHD+ panel with incredibly thin side bezels, with the top and bottom bezels just a smidgen bigger.  The display is a touch display and is the only display available for this laptop.  I don’t use the touch much on a laptop display, but it’s nice if you want/need it.  It worked fine.

The colours and brightness were decent for an IPS panel. However, I feel that in 2025, to build an outstanding laptop, you need to include an OLED panel, and unfortunately, the Inspiron 14 Plus misses the mark here. Why did they choose an IPS panel? Battery life is longer with IPS panels, and OLED panels do cost more, so that is the tradeoff that Dell must have considered before making the IPS panel choice.

I used this laptop mostly for productivity, though: surfing the web, sending emails, and writing. For that, the IPS panel works perfectly fine. If that is all you use this laptop for, you don’t really need an OLED panel—they just look so much better.

The bottom bezel is bigger to house the display electrics and the top bezel houses the webcam and also the Windows Hello IR cam and hardware.  I love Windows Hello and it worked as advertised on the Inspiron 14 Plus repeatedly, even with glasses on.

The touchpad is not the biggest I’ve seen, but it is big enough for a portable laptop, although I wasn’t convinced by the clicking sound it produced. There are better touchpads on the market, and I feel that Dell could have done so much better here. Their XPS laptops have much better touchpads, if you can find them with their hidden edges.

The outside of the laptop is a basic laptop design. Nothing fancy, nothing special, just the usual brushed aluminium look (Dell calls the colour Ice Blue, but it looks awfully silver to me), with the Dell logo in the middle of the lid. This is a basic laptop meant for basic things, though, so the basic design suits it.

Connectivity-wise, the Inspiron 14 Plus includes a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port and an audio jack on the right-hand side of the laptop and on the left two USB-C ports (40Gbps, Power Delivery, and DisplayPort) and a microSD slot.  The laptop is charged through the USB-C port which is great, and something Dell has done for a while with their Inspiron and XPS laptops.

Wireless connectivity is up to date with the latest versions, which support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Both worked great for me, including Wi-Fi 7 at full speed and excellent connectivity.

Specs inside

The review Inspiron 14 Plus (model no. 7441) comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100 chipset, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. However, you can also choose the lower-powered Snapdragon® X Plus, X1P-64-100, which is paired with a 512GB m.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. This option makes the laptop $400 cheaper.

These are the only changes you can make to the laptop before purchasing, with the same display in either version.  

Performance

The Inspiron 14 Plus’s benchmarks were good but not great. It wasn’t the highest-scoring Snapdragon laptop, but it wasn’t the slowest. FWIW, I don’t put that much credence in benchmarks in a productivity laptop anyway. It worked fine, with no lagginess or slowing at any time, no matter which productivity task I threw at it.

Don’t expect the Inspiron 14 Plus to perform as well as a MacBook Air 15 M3 either.  Apple just have that vertical integration down pat – this is only the extremely early days in the Snapdragon laptop life so we need to give it time to mature and be optimised more, from the bottom up.

Herein lies some of the issues though – the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus laptop with the higher specs is priced at $2,400AU and you can get a mid-range MacBook Air 15 for $2,500AU so if someone doesn’t mind MacOS then the Dell may be a hard sell to them, especially without anything mind blowing about it.  You do get a touch screen on the Inspiron 14 Plus though…

Pure raw power is really not required, and most people are happy as long as the laptop can handle basic tasks and basic multitasking while having a great battery life.

Battery life

Dell state that the Inspiron 14 Plus should get “up to 21 hours between charges.”  This seems like a stretch to me.  Running constant video, I achieved around the 18-and-a-half-hour mark but for basic surfing and productivity, I got a tick under 10 and a half hours.  Now that is not too bad for a Windows-based laptop but I’ve had other Snapdragon laptops get more than that so it is a little bit disappointing.  It is a long way from the battery life I ge ton the MacBook Air 15 M3 too.

I thought the big advantage of the Snapdragon chipsets was meant to be battery life but at this stage I’m seeing little evidence that this is the case in real-world scenarios. 

CoPilot+

There are a few basic CoPilot+ AI apps built in, but we’ve seen them all before and were less than impressed. These apps include Recall, Microsoft Pain Cocreator, Live Translator & Captions, and more. They are all super basic, but the real AI onboard use comes from third-party apps.

GIMP has some good uses for image generation, DaVinci Resolve has some great photo editing tools and my favourite, which I also use on Mac, is Luminar Neo which does some amazing photo editing using the on-board AI.

Unless you have a specific use-case for AI (eg. photo editing) then it is still a gimmick for you but buying a laptop that supports on-board AI does help future-proof your purchase to some extent.

I’m still waiting for a PC manufacturer to fully integrate AI into the operating system to enhance battery life, heat dissipation, and laptop speed. Let’s eliminate the photo “editing” and other gimmicks and make AI work for us and our devices.

Conclusion

The Inspiron 14 Plus from Dell is a great laptop. It is snappy and consistent in its performance thanks to the Snapdragon X Elite chipset inside. It is nothing special when it comes to design but what it does do, it does well.

The keyboard is a pleasure to type on with the IPS display good but unfortunately not great. It is not overly heavy, nor light, it is not overly thin nor thick. It is a basic laptop but it does that well, and let’s face it, it is what most people need, nothing fancy but a laptop that will do the job.

The problem lies in its pricing. Although it does feature a new Snapdragon X Elite chipset it is very early days in its development and integration with Windows and it doesn’t seem to offer much, if any, real world advantages.

When you compare it to a MacBook Air 15, which is a similar price, the Inspiron 14 Plus is a tough sell — I would only recommend the Dell for those folks who will not touch MacOS or who specifically need Windows and only need it to do basic things such as surfing, emails and other productivity tasks.

The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus is available now from Dell starting at $1,998AU for the lower version and $2,398 for the top-of-the-line model.