Dell Latitude 9510 review: a fast business laptop with all-day battery life and even a 5G option

The Dell Latitude 9510 is premium option among Dell's business laptops, and if you want to look like a powerful jet-setter in 2022, this thin, light laptop certainly looks the part. It's one of the best Dell laptops, thanks to that smart design, great usability, and plenty of speed.

The Dell Latitude 9510 fits a 15-inch screen into a body that’s surely too small to hold it, alongside more than enough Intel processing power to cope with office and online tasks smoothly.

This isn’t one of the best gaming laptops – it's distinctly underpowered for gaming or heavy graphics work – but for anyone looking for one of the best laptop all-rounders that will last all day on a charge, it's an extremely solid choice. Let's get into why.

Dell Latitude 9510 review: Price

The Latitude 9510 range officially starts at £2,173 ex VAT in the UK, or $2,928 in the US before tax, which nets you an i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM (16GB in the US) and a 256GB SSD. That's really, really high, given that you can get a 13-inch MacBook Pro M1, with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for £1,899 (inc VAT) or $1,899 (before tax).

However, at the time of writing, that model of 9510 is available from Dell with huge discounts, making it much more palatable. It currently starts from just £1,102/$2,049.

The official price remains high as you go up the range, too. We tested a model with a Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD, which costs £2,727/$3,655 – though is currently £1,772/$2,319.

The Latitude 9510 2-in-1 (Core i5, 8GB, 256GB is officially £2,358 ex VAT in the UK (currently £1,532). In the US, you get 16GB of RAM, and it costs $3,238 (currently $2,759). US buyers also have the option of getting this model with 5G built in, which is fantastic – but it's incredibly convoluted to achieve. You'll need to custom configure on Dell's website, and choose a number of replacement parts with '5G' quietly smuggled into their phrasing. The list price for this model is $4,221, as well…

• Browse Dell Latitude 9510 models at Dell UK
• Browse Dell Latitude 9510 models at Dell US

Dell Latitude 9510 review: Design and screen

On the outside, this machine is fairly innocuous. There’s nothing to get excited about in the plain metal casing, the weight of just over 1.5kg neither floats off the table nor weighs you down. You can twist it round and admire the ports (2x Thunderbolt 3, 1x USB 3.2 Type-A, a full-size HDMI 2.0, micro SD, and a headphone socket) and the big vents at the back by the hinges, but it’s not until you open the lid that you can really appreciate it.

What you mainly see when you open the lid, however, is the screen. It’s a particularly lovely one, 1080p resolution and nicely non-reflective with side bezels that are some of the thinnest we’ve seen. The top and bottom are thicker – at the top there’s the webcam, which is a disappointing 720p model, and its mic, plus an IR camera for Windows Hello facial recognition and a proximity sensor that will automatically lock the machine if you move away from it and wake it when you come back. At the bottom, there’s thankfully nothing.

One issue: The lid is held in place with a small catch, which you have to slide to the right before opening and also, cleverly, operates the cover over the webcam. If your finger is in any way wet, or greasy, or slimy, then this catch becomes a pain to operate. So wipe your hand on your trouser leg before using it if you’re in any doubt about where you’ve been putting it. 

Opening the lid also has the effect of starting the machine up, and the NVMe SSD (a 512GB unit in our review model, with 474GB usable) makes startup a snappy process. 

Dell Latitude 9510 review: Usability and performance

Look down from the screen and you encounter the keyboard, framed on three sides by a pair of stereo speakers that are better than they have any right to be (especially given they’re placed directly above the USB/Thunderbolt ports), and the large trackpad that’s immensely pleasant to use, easily rejecting your palm when placed over it to type. 

The keyboard has a comfortable amount of travel, and while it does make a noise in use it’s nothing too egregious. The power button has a built-in fingerprint reader, and is slightly harder to press than the other keys. This is a good thing, as it’s nestled next to the Delete key you may be used to using to send files to the Recycle Bin – reaching out and tapping it using muscle memory could result in the laptop going to sleep if it weren’t for that increased resistance.

Inside our review model there was a six-core/12-thread tenth-generation Intel i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM. That CPU runs at a nice, battery-friendly speed of 1.1GHz most of the time, but can turbo all the way up to 4.9GHz when called upon. This makes for a very responsive system, and while we mostly used it for office tasks and web browsing, it was no slouch at image editing either. 

A Cinebench R20 benchmark score of 1733 places it firmly among the desktop i7s of a few years ago, which isn’t bad for a mobile chip. The weak link is the GPU, which is the integrated Intel UHD type – the absolute bottom of the heap. It’ll drive an external monitor at 4K 60Hz, sure, but don’t expect to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 on this one. Wireless is the new Wi-Fi 6 standard, with Bluetooth 5.1.

Dell Latitude 9510 review: Battery life & noise

The battery lasted from 9am to 5pm, driving an external monitor and with tens of tabs open in Edge as we worked in Google Docs and did internet research. Fully charged in the morning, at the end of the working day it was at 15%. Dell’s website claims a frankly scandalous 34 hours of endurance (with a large caveat that this figure is achievable under lab conditions with an i5 processor and an 88W/hr battery – the one in the 9510 is a 52W/hr unit and it’s not removable). Clever software – the Dell Optimizer – will adjust performance according to parameters you set, targeting either performance or battery life. 

It wasn’t until running the Cinebench R20 benchmark that we even heard its fans. Those wide vents at the back do a good job of clearing waste heat without needing to spin the fans up any faster than is necessary, or audible. They might not be aesthetically pleasing, being kinda chunky looking and placed just inside the shiny hinges that allow the screen to open through 180° (there’s also a touchscreen 2-in-1 model that opens all the way around), but they sure are effective. 

Dell Latitude 9510 review: Verdict

The Dell Latitude 9510 isn't really designed to be exciting, though we certainly wouldn't judge you getting a bit of a thrill from something with giant battery life and potential 5G speeds (for US buyers). But even outside of that, it does a lot right. 

It’s generally a good laptop experience, and we can imagine using it all day without it becoming a problem, or announcing its presence in any way. That may not be thrilling, but it’s what you’re looking for in an office laptop.

However, at full price, the cost keeps it from being a total slam dunk. If you can grab it for sale prices, it's an extremely tempting machine. At full price, we're still massively impressed, but we think a lot of people will be equally happy with the performance of less expensive machines.