Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 review: Strong performance at a decent price

Dell continues to round out its 2024 laptop lineup with the Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640), a larger, flippable laptop with touchscreen and stylus support for tablet-like capabilities alongside a laptop form factor. It packs in recent hardware with modest, though not workstation-class performance, and avoids being overblown when it comes to weight and price. Dell also provides customization options that can make for some significant variety in the machine, with both the system-on-chip and display options providing huge leaps in quality.

Still, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 price only ranges from $999 to $1,599 while offering plenty. For those that don’t need a 2-in-1 laptop, it won’t make much sense as it comes with a few too many trade offs next to standard laptop competitors, but for those who want the flexibility, it may be a good choice.

Looking for more options? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best laptops available today.

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Specs and features

The Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 comes in a couple of configurations. It starts at just $999 for a tame but respectable config built around an Intel Core Ultra 5 125U with 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage, and a 1920×1200 WVA display. Our test configuration bumps up a few specs, doubling the storage, leaping up to the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (and getting its corresponding leap to Intel Arc Graphics), and swapping over to a 2560×1600 Mini-LED display that offers a 90Hz refresh rate and high HDR brightness.

Somewhat hidden among the bumps is a boost to battery size, as the laptop comes with a 64Wh battery in its base spec or a 90Wh option for all other configurations. The test configuration raises the price to $1,349, which is a reasonable uptick for all that it changes. Maxed out, with double the RAM and all other upgrades, it hits $1,499. That goes to $1,599 if you opt for Windows 11 Pro instead of Windows 11 Home. 

• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
• Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X
• Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc Graphics
• Display: 16-inch 2.5K Mini-LED Touch Display
• Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1080p
• Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4, 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 1x HDMI 1.4, 1x SDcard reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio
• Networking: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint
• Battery capacity: 90 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.05 x 9.87 x 0.75 inches
• Weight: 4.68  pounds
• MSRP: $1,349 as-tested ($999 base)

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Design and build quality

The Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is every bit the polished little pebble that the Inspiron 14 Plus I tested earlier this year was, except that the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is a big thing. To fit its 16-inch display, it has to stretch out its chassis considerably. This results in a laptop that, while sleek with its largely aluminum exterior (except the bottom, which is plastic), takes up a good deal of space and packs on the weight at 4.68 pounds. This is pretty much par for the course for 16-inch laptops, though, save those that have put concerted efforts into being ultralight, like the Acer Swift Edge. At least Dell managed to keep it fairly thin at just three-quarters of an inch thick. 

Dell has kept the design fairly simplistic. The chassis largely consists of large, flat expanses edged by smooth curves. This avoids any painful pressure points, but doesn’t make a visually memorable laptop. It’s not alone in this fate, as Lenovo and Samsung have similar laptops. 

If you’re in need of a large system with touchscreen and stylus support, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 checks a lot of boxes.

There are some quirks to the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1, hinting that the laptop took the design of a different model and retooled it. Two small panels on the underside of the laptop cover up what would have been bottom-firing speakers on another laptop. This gives the laptop a weird look from the sides and bottom. Since the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 has top-firing speakers tucked into two large grilles on either side of the keyboard, there’s little reason for the chassis to have had those bottom speaker cutouts unless this chassis was also used elsewhere.

Being a 2-in-1 model, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 has a 360-degree hinge that lets the display flip over backward. You can use it as a tablet — albeit a massive, unwieldy one — or scribble on it with a stylus. The hinge is a little wiggly, but feels sturdy enough. The rest of the chassis hits a similar note, with a modicum of frame flex but decent resistance to light pressure and bending.

With this hinge design, the bottom edge of the lid ends up level with the bottom of the laptop, so the rear exhaust vents directly into the lid. There’s a decent gap for air to escape, but it still still seems like sub-optimal ventilation. Air intake is also minimal with only a small section of the bottom grille actually letting air in. The rest of that grille is blocked just past the grates, likely in a bid to block out debris. It’s a similar story for the vents, with only half of them being real vents with an open channel to the radiator fins.

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Keyboard, trackpad

Like the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, which had an absolutely wonderful keyboard, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 has an excellent keyboard. It might be a little simple with basic backlighting, square keycaps, and a flat surface, but it does the job with decent stabilization to the keycaps and a modest actuation force a travel required to depress each key. It lends to a confident and quick typing.

In my first test in Monketyype, even with one big stall after a typo, I managed 116 words-per-minute with 98 percent accuracy. That was promptly followed by 122 words-per-minute at 99 percent accuracy while feeling a fairly comfortable pace. Unlike its smaller sibling, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 has a huge expanse between the keyboard and the front edge of the laptop, and this can make it a little more uncomfortable to reach up to the keyboard, but it wasn’t enough of a problem to ruin the typing experience on this system. 

For a 16-inch laptop, it’s a shame Dell didn’t do more with the keyboard. It offers just the basics, with no extra navigation keys, spaced out arrow keys, or a number pad. More keys would have meant sacrificing the top-firing speakers unless Dell shifted them to live above the keyboard and squeezed down on the trackpad, and that might have been a smart move for ergonomics and extra utility. Alas, this laptop doesn’t appear designed for folks who will do a lot of data entry, and is instead more for the content creators and consumers, especially with its stylus support. In my testing, the optional stylus was responsive and accurate. 

Dell also fits a massive trackpad below the keyboard. Even with my large hands, it provides plenty of space for multi-finger gestures. The surface is glassy and smooth. It may not be as wide as the Dell XPS 16’s absurdly large trackpad, but it has clearly defined boundaries that make it easy to use. It depresses slightly with clicks and pops back quickly, making it easy to use for hard mouse clicks as well as tap-to-click. 

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Display, audio

The Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 display has some admirable qualities, but don’t let the Mini-LED specification fool you into thinking it’s flawless. The display certainly benefits from the brightness capabilities of its backlight technology, reaching as high as 622.2 nits for a 10 percent window of white in HDR. It can also briefly flash a 100 percent white window at 638 nits, but that brightness level quickly decays down to closer to 400 nits. In SDR it’ll also hold a max of 409.8 nits. It’s a bright display. And, with the Mini-LED backlighting providing strong local dimming, it can achieve a 7230:1 contrast ratio in SDR and HDR only boosts that further.

Those qualities are augmented by exceptional color, hitting 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and offering strong color accuracy with a max dE of 1.18. The screen is also sharp at 2560×1600 and gets a decent bump to smoothness from its 90Hz refresh rate. It’s an altogether pleasant screen for work and entertainment. The glossy surface can suffer from glare a bit, but the screen has the brightness necessary to brute-force its way to visibility. 

Unfortunately, one of the bigger drawbacks of the display also stems from the Mini LED backlighting. The local dimming of the Mini LEDs isn’t incredibly precise and this can produce unsightly vignetting where dark and light content meet. In a bright white window surrounded by dark content, the edges of that white window can appear dimmed because the backlights in the area are lower than those in the center of the white area.

This issue can appear as either bright blooming if dark pixels are getting too much light or as a kind of shading if bright areas don’t get as much backlight because the display is trying to account for nearby dark areas and therefore leaving the nearest backlight dim. If a bright object moves across a black screen, there can also be an apparent flicker as backlights flash on when the bright object passes over them. Small HDR highlights also don’t get as much punch as large ones, as the display won’t brighten one of its backlights for one pixel as much as it would for 1,000 pixels. These are common issues of Mini LED displays, but really tend to fade into the background for most content, letting the positive qualities of the display take center stage.

Dell’s inclusion of both touchscreen and stylus capabilities on the display is useful for interacting with the laptop, and it’s worth noting they don’t seem to come with downsides. While I’ve seen some displays show a visible dot matrix in the display to enable these features, as was the case with the Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED in 2022, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 avoids this for a clean and clear display.

The speakers on the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 are a decent pairing for the display. They can pump out considerable volume, easily enough to max out what anyone should be listening to with a device within arm’s reach. If you’re just trying to watch something with a friend or two in a quiet room, they’ll do the job there too. They can push out a modest frequency range, even giving a little lift to the bass, though they are far from sounding full and leave a gap between the bass they do produce and the mids. They largely focus on mids and can be a little overly bright in the treble, and they seem to duck some of the lower end when the mids are present. Sub-bass is out of the question. 

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Webcam, microphone, biometrics

You’ll get a 1080p webcam with the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 that does a decent job with lighting, not suffering from serious over- or under-exposure. It also provides natural-looking color. It does produce somewhat soft footage, but it can still do the job it needs to do. The laptop has a built-in privacy shutter that slides over the camera as well, so you can easily cover it up. The cover has black and white lines on it which can just look like a reflection in some scenarios though, so it’s not always easy to tell at a glance if the light is actually covered. 

The microphones on the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 are not impressive by default, but have room for improvement. They pick up everything a little too clearly, including background noise. But Dell has a noise suppression feature just a couple clicks away in the MyDell applications. It’s strange that it’s not enabled by default, because it does an effective and largely crucial job when it comes to providing a clear voice when hopping on calls. 

While you can use a password or PIN to sign into the laptop, there’s also a small fingerprint scanner at the top right corner of the keyboard. This works quickly and effectively in my experience.

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Connectivity

For a 16-inch laptop, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 has only a modest number of ports, but it covers its bases and provides variety. Two 5Gbps USB-A ports are on offer, with one on each side. The laptop includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports as well, but both are located on the left side, forcing you to charge the laptop on the left as a result. There’s also a full-size HDMI 1.4 port on the left side that Dell says doesn’t support 4K output, so the Thunderbolt 4 ports appear to be the intended display output for many users. 

The right of the laptop also includes a 3.5mm audio combo jack and a full-size SD card reader. That latter inclusion is a boon for photographers who can easily transfer photos without having to rely on a dongle, which would just add to the weight they’re already taking on with this laptop. 

Wireless connectivity has been strong. Wi-Fi 6E provides a strong baseline with many existing wireless networks and should hold up for years to come with plenty of bandwidth for most tasks. The Bluetooth 5.3 connection held stable in testing with wireless headphones over hours of use. 

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Performance

The Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is a reasonably kitted out ultrabook, running on the same Intel Core Ultra series of processors we’ve been seeing in a bunch of similar laptops lately. With the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and 16GB of memory, it’s sitting near the middle of the road for what’s on offer. There’s no shortage of machines with similar offerings. The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9 bumps up the specs a bit and fits in discrete graphics for $350 extra. Meanwhile, the Acer Aspire Vero 16 AV16-51P-5641 and Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 (Gen 9 2024) drop down to more basic displays and Intel Core Ultra 5 125U processors with weaker graphics but cut a lot from the price tag. The Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7440 (2024) is also a viable competitor, with similar internals fitted into a smaller package.

Performance on the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is reasonably strong. It scores solid marks in PCMark 10, which is a fairly holistic test for a system’s capabilities across a broad range of tasks. Impressively, it keeps up fairly well with the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9, which has the benefit of more memory and discrete graphics. Storage can come into play in this test, though, and the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 offers quick storage with a PCIe NVMe SSD capable of over 5,000MB/s read speeds — not blistering, but speedy.

The performance is enough to keep the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 ahead of the two systems with the weaker Intel Core Ultra 5 125U chips, though not enough to truly outshine its cheaper, smaller sibling meaningfully, which falls behind largely as a result of just one component: its slower storage.

Though the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 may be a match for Lenovo’s higher-spec system when it comes to general purpose tasks, Handbrake highlights their differences when it comes to outright performance. The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9 is able to encode our test video in nearly half the time of the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1. In addition to a higher performing chip, the Lenovo system is likely benefitting from enhanced cooling, as the Inspiron’s performance gradually declined from the start of the test.

That difference plays out in Lenovo’s favor a second time with the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 9 falling only about 20 percent behind the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 in this test despite wielding the lower-power Intel Core Ultra 5 125U. Meanwhile the Acer Aspire Vero 16 shows clearly where performance can land with weaker cooling. Impressively, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7440 manages to beat its bigger sibling in this test. Dell isn’t making the most of the size of the 16-incher to enhance cooling, and this just highlights it.

Cinebench serves to further highlight the differences of these systems, but demonstrates shorter, bursty workloads. Here again, we see that with the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9, you get what you pay for when it comes to performance upgrades. The smaller Inspiron 14 Plus even ekes out a lead over the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 again, albeit small, suggesting just how quickly its larger sibling can start to thermal throttle under load. The Inspiron 14 Plus is clearly benefiting from its extra side vent for sustaining performance over the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1’s single strip of semi-obstructed rear venting.

Graphics performance is unsurprising in this match-up. Intel Arc Graphics are impressive for an integrated option, but no match for even the low-level RTX 4050 packed inside the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9, which more than doubled the performance.

Dell’s laptops both easily outpace the two laptops with basic Intel Graphics. Though the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 has a margin lead over the Inspiron 14 Plus in 3DMark’s Time Spy test here, it’s a slim lead that belies a bigger difference (the smaller Inspiron largely outpaced it again in the CPU performance portion of this test), and the difference is slim enough that it could come down to something as simple how good the contact is between the chip and heat pipe inside the laptop. 

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Battery life

The Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is a reasonably strong performer when it comes to battery life. With its 88Wh battery (a little smaller than the 90Wh spec Dell lists), it manages to run for just shy of 13 hours in our battery test, which plays a 4K video on loop with the display at 250 nits. This dramatically outpaces the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9, serving as a reminder the discrete graphics usually come with a big hit to longevity. Of course, we also get a reminder that fancy displays can also come with hits to battery life.

Impressive though it might be, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is only narrowly leading the Acer Aspire 16 in battery life and Acer is running on a much smaller, 53Wh battery. The Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 9 also has a lead with its 71Wh battery. Both are likely benefiting from their lower-power chips and simpler display technology. Meanwhile, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus outshines them all. It benefits from its simpler and smaller screen, managing to get over 17 hours from a 64Wh battery.

Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 (7640): Conclusion

The Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 is a specialty machine and to deliver on that quality, it makes some unfortunate sacrifices. While it has powerful hardware inside and a display with some truly excellent qualities, it misses the mark in other areas. Its performance is hampered by its design. We’ve seen the same components perform far better in other systems and Dell’s cooling system and power management appears to blame here. And though the display is largely gorgeous, it’s not ideal for all circumstances and takes quite a bit of power to make the most of. 

Despite some of these fumbles, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 still manages to be a fair value for the right users. If you’re in need of a large system with touchscreen and stylus support, the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 checks a lot of boxes. And it’s not as though it’s a weak system so much as it doesn’t keep up with some of its competitors. While Dell clearly had to make some sacrifices to build a machine with 2-in-1 capabilities, it’s those capabilities that may still make it a worthwhile system for some.

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