Dell Rugged Extreme 7330

Hello all,

For the sake of sharing experiences with the oh-so-important tool: Field Computers I thought I’d jot down my experiences with a newly acquired Dell Rugged Extreme 7330.

The reason I got this was due to a colleague (who shall remain unnamed) sitting on a tree stump with my computer. The stump gave way and my Rugged Extreme 7424 with a port open for USB dongle was catapulted into the small stream together with my colleague.

We promptly received confirmation that the computer was not ingress protected at all with the port cover open as it promprly started to ask me what type of headphones I had just plugged into the 3.5mm stereo jack next to the USB port.

Long story short, they 7424 behemoth sized field computer is out of production and I was given the 7330 as its replacement. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/latitude-7330-rugged-extreme-laptop/spd/latitude-13-7330-laptop/xctolr7330usvi?redirectTo=SOC

So far I am thoroughly impressed. They cut a lot of weight and thickness and only made the screen every so slightly smaller. There are a fair bit of ports available as well as SD-card reader, built in WWAN, Smart card reader etc. Exactly the same quite decent specs as on the 7424 (of course these are customizable).

One thing that I was unhappy with on the 7424 was that the specified battery life was nowhere near what we saw in terms of actual performance. With the 7330 I’m seeing 12 hours of use, and easy hot swap of batteries etc.

I have only had it for about a week, but so far it seems to be a very good middle way between the tablet-gone-PC (with a 12″ screen making it difficult to see things) and the 14″ behemoth.

I’ll come back with a more thorough review when ive had it longer.