Customer Ratings & Reviews

TLDR: A 1920X1600 HD resolution 16” LED touchscreen, Intel Core Ultra7 335 CPU with 16Gb of LPDDR5 (soldered) RAM, 512GB of PCIe SSD storage with CoPilot+ weighing a scant 4 lbs, charged with USB-C, illuminated numeric keyboard and large haptic touchpad. An aluminum chassis, 16 inch touchscreen Windows 11 computer laptop, with illuminated keyboard, Intel Core Ultra7 2335 CPU running at 4.7 GHz speed, and sufficient RAM and storage to make it desirable. DELL Model 16S DS16260 per the BIOS screen in the computer . I found it on the DELL website. I know it works fast and smoothly. The blue is a very dark blue. Arrives with Windows 11 Home, an Intel Core7 Series 3, 16GB of soldered LPDDR5 RAM and SSD storage of SanDisk M.2 512 GB size. Graphics are processed by Intel Graphics with 64MB of VRAM. Some of this info is from the BIOS screens. About 30 updates were installed for the first two hours, on and off, that I used the computer. After all the updates installed the performance is very stable and smooth. I know the computer is fast, runs silently, will open many tabs on Edge browser with no sweat, tests out with good audio volume, very good video playback on You Tube and sites such as Pluto, Netflix, Prime Video for existing accounts, and also fires up Google Sheets and Docs quickly. The onboard video is handled by Intel Graphics GPU inherent on the motherboard. I used it for some test Google Voice calls and no one said I sounded bad and everyone I called sounded clear also. I set it to recognize my face instead of my typing in the system password and that works even in low lighting using it in my bedroom in the evening. I used CoPilot + to gather up information on search topics and the dedicated key worked every time. I also used it to summarize a web page or an email exchange being I am on two boards where at times others send too many almost useless emails so CoPilot+ is a big time saver for me in going through the emails. The touchscreen is very smooth and responsive and I am one of the constant users of any touchscreen computer so I appreciate a touchscreen more than a laptop without such a screen. The color quality is good albeit it is not an OLED but very much usable since it produces a very clear and sharp image both on videos, on spreadsheets or word processing, or news web sites for reading. Yes I like to read my news stories. It produces very clear audio from the small internal speakers. The analog audio output jack works fine to some 3way computer speakers I still have. The power adapter is a 65 watt adapter terminated in a USB-C plug on a approximately 5 foot long power cord (not chord) which also is good to charge up my smartphone, my home wireless doorbell, and other items such as headphones, power batteries, and many other items now using USB-C for charging. Dell does not supply a protective padded sleeve in the box, but should (look at the firm starting with A and ending with R Mr. Dell.) The keyboard is easy to use and is illuminated for use later at night and it has a regular numeric keypad on the right being that it is a wider chassis due to the 16” screen. Very nice. I got into the BIOS settings and adjusted the keyboard lighting to stay on for 5 minutes from the too short 1 minute. Other settings including always on are available. One setting in the BIOS seems to allow powering on when the lid is opened but I have to try that again to see if it will do that. I like that feature that some Windows laptops (and most Chromebooks) have. I also engaged the BIOS setting so the battery only charges to 80% to prolong it’s liffe several years by not stressing it to charge to 100%. Read about this if you are not familiar. I tested it with two large monitors using a USB-C to HDMI adapter plugged into one of the USB-C ports and yes it does provide DisplayPort functionality with audio and video to enable multiple external monitors. I also plugged it via USB-C cable into a Samsung SmartMonitor and the video image instantly appeared on the Samsung and the DELL laptop started charging also. Dell says the chassis is aluminum, I may at some point open up the bottom to explore but not until the warranty has expired. The warranty is 1 year. It weighs just below 4 pounds US I like it and will use it often.

Hardware Unboxing the 16S you’ll find the laptop itself and a 65W USB-C charger; the laptop includes 2 USB-A ports, 2 Thunderbolt USB-C ports, a dedicated HDMI out, and a headphone jack. Some really positive things about the hardware: The laptop is built on a rigid aluminum frame that allows for virtually no body nor keyboard flex. The mousepad is large without getting in the way of typing; it’s plastic with a smooth matte finish, mimicking the finish of the aluminum frame. The keys feel really pleasant to type on and have very little wiggle; they are also plastic. The screen hinge spans almost the entire width of the laptop body, rather than being two small hinges on the ends of the screen; it feels incredibly solid and sturdy. While not being a 2-in-1 laptop, the hinge also opens completely flat to 180°. The speakers sound pleasantly impressive and can get REALLY loud. They’re very clear, and for being small laptop speakers, they can produce good detail and completely fine bass (nothing thumpy, but typical bass instrument frequencies come through clearly). They’re able to handle really busy music/audio without any sort of distortion, even at loud volumes. All of this is achieved without any sort of pre-installed Dolby enhancement software, so what you hear is what the speakers truly sound like, which I find to be a plus. The 16S model includes a dedicated calculator key and a numberpad. A couple things to keep in mind about the hardware: The speakers… …are downfiring. Listening on a flat surface will warrant the best results, while listening on your lap might muffle the sound some. …are only covered by some fabric under the frame, rather than a metal grill flush with the frame. I can see the fabric picking up a lot of dust and debris as time goes on. The screen gets moderately bright, so it might be a bit difficult to work with the 16S in a very sun-lit room or outside. The camera is serviceable. It has a fairly wide picture and will work perfectly fine for Zoom or the like. Storage is upgradeable, as long as you replace the boot M.2 drive. RAM is soldered and not upgradeable, though the standard 16GB configuration will be plenty for general multitasking. Really small nitpick, but the number lock key on the keyboard has no physical light indicator for being enabled/disabled, and no on-screen feedback pops up showing if it gets turned on or off. The number pad keys themselves also don’t have any alt text or icons other than the numbers themselves. Software The 16S comes with a couple standard Dell product applications for handling device performance and software updates–no extensive or ridiculous bloatware. Performance The 16S’s battery life averaged around 5-8 hours of consistent but differing use, switching between more intensive gaming/video editing tests to simple music streaming and work on Chrome. It’s perfectly capable of general multitasking, especially with the extra display capabilities it has through the dedicated HDMI and Thunderbolt ports. At no point in using it did it struggle to handle multiple Chrome tabs on the screen with music streaming in the background, even with an eventual DaVinci Resolve video editing test going on at the same time. A quick Minecraft run proved that the 16S is capable of handling some light gaming, as it provided a smooth 100-180fps on default graphics settings. The DaVinci Resolve test involved two existing project files: a 1080p project with a lot of added text captions and FX, and a 4K project utilizing 4K recordings. The 16S played back both projects fairly smoothly with a few minor hiccups during heavily edited parts. Based on these couple of tests, the 16S proved to be a capable machine, giving me faith that it can pretty confidently handle other things like photo editing or even music production on top of its capability to handle an everyday school or job workflow.

SET UP EXPERIENCE I'm not sure why this happens, but it seems that when a manufacturer offers a modern Windows machine, they cannot manage to install the most recent version of the operating system. I can understand the appeal of a fruit computer when unboxing. Their product actually is ready to use. A modern Windows machine is immediately sucking up your first hour of usage by having to install whatever version of the OS it ships. And I can assure you, this laptop not only installed a new version at the very setup process, there were dozens of updates that installed later. I am not even a Fruit computer lover, but I can see the appeal to those who just want to use their new computer in the first hour. Unfortunately I have tested several PC laptops recently and this is not unique to DELL. This is the sorry state of PC building that absolutely needs to change. If you built this last week, why is the OS nearly 6 months old that ships? USER EXPERIENCE Now that the computer can actually be used, it is quite a nice computer - 16 inch screen that is vibrant with a touch capability that only Windows machines these days seem to offer. The backlit keyboard is nice to look at and to use. Very clear in darkness. The trackpad is neither the best nor the worst I've used which is a good thing. I noticed that once the computer was not consuming bandwidth updating, the computer booted up quickly and was peppy enough to use as a daily driver. THE MODERN REALITY OF LIMITATIONS This computer comes with a paltry 512 mb of storage. I consider 1 gig to be the bare minimum to use a computer these days - you would likely be warned to store data on a usb drive because you will be using every bit of this computer's onboard storage very quickly. This would be a good daily user for basic tasks but beyond that I wouldn't push it.