Moving on to display gamut, the Latitude can reproduce 73 percent of the demanding AdobeRGB spectrum, while the Thinkpad only manages 53 percent. That’s a big difference, and it shows in everyday use. The XPS pulls ahead of both the Latitude and Thinkpad, however, with a display capable of reproducing 76 percent of the AdobeRGB spectrum. When we measured the E5470's display with our colorimeter, it reproduced 113.1 percent of the sRGB color gamut. That's well above the average thin-and-light notebook (83.2 percent), and it also beats the EliteBook, ThinkPad and Tecra. The review unit also manages almost 11 hours in our more realistic Wi-Fi test, so it should easily last even a long business day. The Dell Latitude E5450(6.5 hours), Lenovo ThinkPad T460s(5.5 hours) and HP EliteBook 840 G2(7 hours) cannot keep up with this runtime.

With a small, sleek form-factor and modest battery life, the Latitude is a very portable machine for business travelers or anyone who needs to spend most of their workday without being tethered to a desk. Slim and light The E5470 also performed well in the Delta-E test for color accuracy (where best scores are closer to 0), with a mark of 1.07. The Tecra (0.9) was slightly better in this test, but the Latitude's colors are more precise than those of the EliteBook, ThinkPad and average ultraportable notebook. Even though our E5470 came with a discrete AMD Radeon R7 GPU, it was unable to run Rainbow Six or Metro: Last Light at acceptable speeds. It didn't fare well in the 3DMark Fire Storm benchmark, either, recording a score of 1,064, which is worse than the average for thin-and-light notebooks (1,483). The Radeon R7-powered EliteBook (1,064) earned the same benchmark score, while the ThinkPad (738) and Tecra (645) fared even worse. In this case, we don't see the AMD graphics adding any value.The Latitude E5470 scored a solid 9,760 on Geekbench 3, a synthetic benchmark that measures overall performance. That mark handily beats the results earned by the AMD A12-powered EliteBook 745 G3 (5,494), Core i5-5300U-powered ThinkPad T450s (5,993), Core i7-5600U-powered Tecra Z40t-B (6,427) and the average thin-and-light notebook (6,229). The Latitude’s display is not only bright and colorful, but the colors are remarkably accurate. With an average color error of 1.69, the Latitude delivers color accuracy good enough for a bit of photo editing on-the-go, if not quite good enough to replace a dedicated, professional monitor. The Latitude E5470 isn’t going to win any industrial design awards, but it has a certain quiet elegance. We can neither find maintenance hatches nor a battery at the bottom of the case. This means you will have to remove the whole bottom cover to gain access to the components.

The Latitude E5470 doesn’t need to have a great display, and it could get by with just a decent or mediocre screen. After all, it’s destined for a life of spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and the occasional in-flight movie — nothing that would require a lush and colorful screen. The E5470's 256GB SSD drive copied 4.97GB of multimedia files in a speedy 34 seconds -- a rate of 150.79 MBps. That's faster than the 256GB SSD drives on the EliteBook, ThinkPad and the average thin-and-light notebook (118.58 MBps). The E5470 comes with Dell's standard Limited Hardware Warranty, which has one year of mail-in services that require after remote diagnosis. The E5470's 0.9-megapixel webcam shot bright photos of me in our well-lit New York office. The red Purch Media wall was rendered accurately, but the photo was so noisy that it lost a lot of detail.

Performance

Despite having a mostly plastic body, the Latitude E5470 is built like a small, plastic tank. The body doesn’t flex, or give in any troubling way, and it would absolutely survive several years of being hauled in and out of a messenger bag, facing the rigors of daily use. When it comes to formal benchmarks, the battery life falls a bit short of its nearest competitors. On the Peacekeeper battery test the Latitude managed just over four and a half hours, while the Thinkpad, which features hot-swappable batteries, managed about four hours and fifty minutes, with the XPS 13 lasting about six minutes longer. You can also spec either one just beyond the Latitude, and come in at about the same price with a handful of premium features, including one of the most attractive chassis on the market today, and the latest 7th-generation Intel Core processors. We start with the maximum runtime at minimum brightness and simulate the reading of a text document. The review unit will last 21:44 hours and therefore clearly beats the Latitude E5450(13:14 hours) and the Lenovo ThinkPad T460s(14 hours).

Lenovo's ThinkPad T450s (which is about to be replaced by the upcoming T460s) offers longer battery life, a better keyboard and a cooler-running chassis. However, if you want a lightweight, 14-inch business laptop with a colorful display and strong performance, the Dell Latitude E5470 is a very strong choice.The hard disk will probably have you pulling your hair out before the end of 2017. It’s just not fast enough for anything other than long-term and infrequent storage. You’re much better off investing in an SSD of half the size.

In fact, the only out-of-the-box bloatware present on the Latitude was included with Windows 10. There were a few Windows Store apps we didn’t really need, and more than a handful of Microsoft trial apps that deserved a swift and just removal. Warranty information According to our light meter, the E5470's display emits up to 278 nits of brightness, which outshines the ThinkPad (236 nits), Tecra (265 nits) and average thin-and-light notebook (243 nits). The EliteBook (317 nits) manages to get even brighter. The E5470 also benefits from wide viewing angles. When I moved 75 degrees to the left or right, the display maintained quality color and crisp details.The E5470 may disappoint road warriors, as it offers shorter endurance than other business laptops. The system lasted 7 hours and 16 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test (Web surfing with 100 nits of brightness). While that runtime beats the EliteBook (5:54), it's shorter than the ThinkPad (7:31, 15:26 with extended battery), Tecra (8:23) and the average thin-and-light notebook (8:14). Our test unit of the E5470 has a four-cell, 62-watt-hour battery, which means you'll get even less battery life from the notebook's default three-cell, 47-Wh battery. The Dell Latitude E5470's strong performance seems to come at the price of a few hot points on the notebook. After 15 minutes of streaming video on the laptop, the notebook's undercarriage hit an uncomfortable temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, well above our 95-degree threshold. The notebook's touchpad and keyboard were a cooler 82 and 92 degrees, respectively. Additionally, when I was multitasking with Chrome and Windows Defender, the space to the left of the keyboard spiked a temperature of 115 degrees. That unpleasant mark didn't change when we set the AMD Catalyst Control Center to "Optimize power savings" or "Force power-saving graphics." Changing the Dell Power Manager utility's Thermal Management setting from Optimized to Cool did not help, either.