I picked up the Inspiron 13 Special Edition (2015 edition) in late March of this year.
Build Quality: The overall build quality of the machine is quite nice. The soft touch plastic on the display is nice, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. The aluminum palm rest is beautiful and feels great to the touch. The hinges seem sturdy so far, this is always a concern of mine when buying Dell laptops and I usually shy away from them because of the hinge quality, but so far this machine has had zero issues. The machine isn't the lightest notebook on the market but but is definitely not bad at 3.68 pounds. It fits nicely in a backpack and takes up very little space on a desk or table and sits comfortably in my lap.
Performance: The machine came with an Intel Core i5 5200U with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB mechanical hard drive. The hard drive is going to be the biggest drawback as it's a slow 5400 RPM mechanical hard drive. The first thing I did was replace the drive with a Toshiba 256GB SSD and the difference was night and day. Apps load quickly, the machine boots up fast and powers on from standby very quickly! With the SSD you don't have the fear of the hard drive failing if you bump the machine or it gets moved around a lot while it's on.
The Intel HD 500 graphics do alright for most things, it has no problem powering the beautiful 1080p IPS display. Streaming movies on Netflix or YouTube in 1080p are flawless. Some older games work fine, like Left4Dead 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and some simple games like The Binding of Isaac. More modern games probably won't play well on this machine, and that's okay, it's not being marketed as a gaming PC.
Applications like Office 2013, Google Chrome, Skype, all work beautifully and the 8GB of RAM is plenty for multitasking.
Battery life: The machine is advertised as getting 7 or more hours of battery life, realistically, expect around 6 hours of light use. With the SSD upgrade I can get a little closer to 7 hours if i'm just browsing the internet and brightness set around 40%. Standby time is great as the machine will shut down after a few minutes after going to standby and booting back up takes seconds with the SSD, it is a little slower waking up with the included manual hard drive.
Speakers: The speakers are okay. They're decently loud and at lower volumes have some depth to them, at higher volume they get tinny and lose quality. They are in a weird spot, they fire out of the bottom on the left and right side of the palm rest towards the front of the machine. They're fine if you're sharing a YouTube video or watching Netflix but don't expect studio quality sound from them.
Display: This display is fantastic. The TrueLife IPS panel looks great, it gets reasonably bright but is not perfect for outdoor viewing. Colors look great, blacks are excellent and colors are bright and vivid. Viewing angles are great as well. There is a little shadow effect on each side of the screen, i'm guessing it has to do with the touch digitizer.
Speaking of touch, the touch screen works great, it's accurate and supports up to ten points of touch simultaneously. Personally, I don't use touch very often, i bought the machine for it's portability, touch screen is just an added bonus.
Connectivity: The machine has built in WiFi 802.11AC 2.4 / 5GHZ and works as you would expect. Bluetooth is a nice addition that also works well.
The machine has 2x USB 3.0 ports and 1x USB 2.0 port, a full size HDMI port, a single 3.5 mm headphone / headset jack that works with standard headphones as well as headphones with a built in microphone. There's also a full size SD card slot for those of you who need additional storage or have a digital camera and want a quick way to back up photos.
The webcam works alight, I don't have anything to compare it to as both of my laptops have built in webcams and they both look about the same as far as quality.
Keyboard and Trackpad: The keyboard is nice, the keys have a nice satisfying click to them and the travel isn't too bad. The backlight is a nice addition and has three settings, dim, bright and off.
The touchpad is much nicer than what Dell has used in the past and works as you would expect. It's not as nice as Apple's offerings, but for a Windows based laptop, it does very well.
Final thoughts: Overall I am happy with my laptop, I would recommend upgrading the hard drive to an SSD. I like how Dell built the machine so the hard drive and RAM are user replaceable, as these are the two components most likely to fail.