Dell Latitude 10 tablet review

Windows 8 hasn't taken off as well as Microsoft would have liked, but six months on there's still a steady stream of products being rolled out with Redmond's latest OS. 

Dell's Latitude 10 is of particular interest to businesses. There are three versions of this Windows 8 Pro tablet, and it's the Standard edition we're interested in. It's the most versatile - having support for Wacom's digitiser hardware and the option for a removable battery.

Standalone tablet

The Latitude 10 stands out thanks to its bevy of accessories rather than its design. It's a plain-looking bit of kit, with a glossy Gorilla Glass front panel giving way to a matte black rear. The Dell branding is discreet, and the front panel is only disturbed by a 2-megapixel webcam and a Windows button.

Despite being constructed from magnesium alloy, the Latitude 10 doesn't get a clean bill of health when it comes to build quality. Although the back panel is reasonably strong, there's a little too much give around the bezel for our liking.

The left-hand side has a Kensington lock slot and soft-touch volume rocker, there's a USB port, headphone jack and mini-HDMI output on the right-hand edge, and the top houses an SD card reader, power button and auto-rotation toggle. There's a microUSB slot at the bottom of the device next to the proprietary power connection. None of the Latitude's USB sockets use the quicker USB 3 standard, but they are powered, so they can be used with external hard disks.

The Latitude 10 isn't particularly chunky or heavy with its standard battery installed: its 10.5mm girth and 658g weight are in the middle of the tablet pack. Slot in the four-cell power pack and it's a different story: the thickness hits 15.9mm. It's an issue if you want to use the Latitude with its larger battery inside its case it doesn't quite fit and, even if you do cram it inside, the lid doesn't close properly.

Peripheral matters

We've not yet seen a Windows 8 tablet include a dock, and Dell's peripheral helps its device to stand out. The matte base is made from soft-touch plastic, and the tablet itself rests on a curved metal stand that rises up from the desk.

Dell has kitted out the dock with a broad range of ports and sockets. The front has a USB 2 socket and a headphone jack. Three more USB ports are served up on the rear along with a Gigabit Ethernet socket and an HDMI output.

There's one thing key feature missing from the dock -  a battery.  Dell has deemed it unnecessary due to its offering of an extended power pack for the tablet itself. It's not our only dock-related quibble: there's no way to change the tablet's angle, and the connection between dock and tablet is flimsy a gentle nudge was enough to send the Latitude tumbling to the desk.