Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (2024)

A screen size of 10.1 inches is small as tablets go, but when you're running into harm's way you don't want to be weighed down. The Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Tablet (starts at $2,399; $3,823.57 as tested) is a slate for first responders, field workers, and military personnel working in adverse conditions. Pouring rain? Sandstorms? Four-foot drops? Not a problem. The Latitude 7030's size makes the rugged tablet—a rugged laptop if you spring for the detachable keyboard—less expandable than larger rivals, but it's a handy way to carry Windows where, say, Microsoft's Surface Pro fears to tread.

Configurations and Design: So, You Want to Play Rough?

Combat armor doesn't come cheap, though Dell says virtually all Latitudes are bought at corporate volume discounts rather than the singular prices quoted here. Penny-pinchers can configure a Latitude 7030 with an Intel Core i3 processor, but the $2,399 base model features a Core i5-1240U with vPro IT manageability tech, 8GB of memory, a 256GB solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Pro.

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Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (1)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The 10.1-inch, glove-friendly touch screen has a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution and is rated at 1,000 nits of brightness for viewing in the outdoor sun. Front- and rear-facing cameras pack 5- and 11-megapixel resolutions, respectively.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (2)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Our test configuration, priced at $3,323.58 plus a steep $499.99 for the keyboard, upgrades to a Core i7-1260U vPro chip (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads), the max 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. It has two hot-swappable batteries and a screw-on rigid carrying handle that stashes a tethered stylus pen. Options include 5G mobile broadband compatible with the proprietary FirstNet emergency network.

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Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (11)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Ready for temperatures ranging from 20 below to 145 degrees Fahrenheit, the Dell bears an IP65 ingress protection rating, indicating it's dirt- and dust-proof and shrugs off rain, splashes, and 4.4psi water jets. The Durabook R11 has an IP66 rating for higher-pressure hoses, but neither can survive being immersed or submerged. The tablet without a keyboard measures 1 by 10.3 by 7.4 inches and weighs 2.24 pounds, making it trimmer and lighter than its 10.1-inch rival, the Panasonic Toughbook G2.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (12)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

An I/O bay on the tablet's top edge comes with an Ethernet jack by default, though you can opt for a USB Type-A port, a headphone audio jack (sadly not standard), or a bar code scanner. You'll also find a security lock slot on the left, along with a USB-A 3.2 port, microSD card slot, and two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports (either good for charging) on the right side. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth come standard as well. Plastic covers snap over the ports to aid dust and water resistance.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (13)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Using the Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme: Sharp Lenses, Snappy Keys

The power button, which doubles as a Windows Hello fingerprint reader, sits on the back of the device. So do the two batteries, which have sliding latches for hot-swappable removal and tiny buttons with lines of LEDs that serve as power gauges, so you can check their charge when the tablet's turned off.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (14)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Both the front-facing (webcam) and rear-facing cameras have sliding privacy shutters. The former captures images up to 2,560 by 1,440 pixels, up to 1080p or 1440p videos, and provides IR face recognition for password-free logins. The rear camera with flash can take 3,648-by-2,736-pixel (4:3 aspect ratio) or 3,840-by-2,160 (16:9) stills and up to 4K videos. Both capture well-lit and colorful images with minimal noise or static.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (15)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (16)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

I doubt our troops are using their tablets as MP3 players or Netflix screens on deployment, but the 7030 cranks out surprisingly loud and crisp sound—not a hint of bass, but not tinny or harsh and clear enough to make out overlapping tracks.

The 1,920-by-1,200-pixel touch screen fell a bit shy of its advertised 1,000 nits in my testing (see below) but was bright enough to read in the noonday sun. Plus, while it's no Adobe Premiere or CGI workstation, the 7030 screen shows more vivid color than I'm used to from rugged PCs. The display's hues are rich and well saturated, and its fine details are sharp; meanwhile, its viewing angles are wide, and contrast is high.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (17)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Dell's 5.3-inch stylus tied to the carrying handle is a simple stick with no buttons, meant for tapping or checking boxes rather than handwriting or sketching. It's marked with inches and centimeters to serve as an emergency ruler.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (18)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (19)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

A latch squeezed between your thumb and forefinger secures and releases the keyboard, which shines with four levels of backlighting in your color of choice. The keys include top-row brightness, volume, and microphone mute controls, along with dedicated Home and End keys (though Page Up and Page Down are relegated to the Fn key plus up and down arrows). The lower-left Control and Fn keys are small, but the keyboard has a satisfactorily snappy typing feel and a responsive buttonless touchpad. It's infinitely better than the on-screen virtual keyboard for more than a few characters of data entry.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (20)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

In addition to familiar utilities like SupportAssist (system updates and network optimization) and Dell Optimizer (performance tweaking for favorite applications and settings such as microphone noise cancellation), the Latitude Rugged Extreme Tablet comes with Dell Rugged Control Center, a program that must be running for you to take advantage of four customizable buttons below the screen. These are P1 and P2 buttons to summon system controls, as well as "plus" and "minus" buttons to adjust audio volume, screen brightness, and screen rotation lock. The app also lets you add a pop-up menu for functions such as a rear-camera flashlight, night or stealth modes (disabling lights and radios), and optimizing the touch screen for finger, glove, or wet/rainy use.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (21)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Speaking of wet, I didn't do my utmost to bust the 7030, but I tossed it into the sink and ran the faucet and sprayer over it with no ill effects. I also dropped it half a dozen times from about four feet onto a carpeted floor and a grassy lawn, with and without the keyboard attached. Except for the stylus flying out of its handle niche, nothing untoward happened.

Testing the Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme: Built for Neither Comfort Nor Speed

For our benchmark charts, we pitted the Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Tablet against two rough-and-tumble tablets tested last year, the 11.6-inch Durabook R11 and the 12-inch Dell Latitude 7230 Rugged Extreme Tablet, and 2022's 11.6-inch Getac F110 G6. The last slot went to a 13.3-inch rugged laptop with a nondetachable keyboard, the Getac B360 G2.

Productivity Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Several years ago, we said a score of 4,000 points in PCMark 10 showed decent productivity for everyday office apps like Word and Excel. That's still true, but these were some of the lowest scores we've seen lately—none of these rugged systems were screamers, and the Dell 7030's Core i7 performed more like a Core i5. The little tablet did quite well in Photoshop, but it's built for doing work in the field, not rivaling workstations in an office. Considering this was a trend across all of the rugged systems tested, it's clear where your expectations should be regardless.

Graphics Tests

We test each Windows PC's graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We normally add two results from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, whose rendered-offscreen tests stress both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 7030 balked at one, 1440p Aztec Ruins, but completed the 1080p Car Chase test.

The Latitude 7030 found itself in the front half of a rather sluggish pack. Nobody buys a rugged tablet to play games much less watch movies on, though the Dell is fine for solitaire or streaming video back at the HQ.

Battery and Display Tests

We test each laptop's and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

It's almost essential that the 7030's batteries are hot-swappable because they're puny—only 18 watt-hours apiece, so even a pair can't match the 50-to-90WHr capacity of most laptops. They managed to last for eight hours in our video rundown, but a first responder working a full shift might want to carry a spare or two. On a happier note, the Latitude's screen is more than bright and colorful enough to satisfy.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (22)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Verdict: Not a Fair-Weather Friend, But a Poor-Weather Pal

If its batteries lasted longer, the Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Tablet would claim an Editors' Choice award. Even without one, it tops the 11.6-inch Durabook R11, whose cameras and optional keyboard can't match the Dell's and whose battery isn't hot-swappable. We'd choose the larger Latitude 7230 for its nearly doubled battery life, but the 7030 is a first-class choice for risk-takers who want something more compact.

Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme

4.0

See It$2,399.00 at Dell

Starts at $2,399.00

Pros

  • Tough enough for all-weather use

  • Bright, colorful touch screen

  • Impressive cameras

  • Detachable keyboard

  • Available 5G WWAN

ViewMore

Cons

  • Merely adequate battery life

  • Heavy and expensive

  • Audio jack is optional

The Bottom Line

A sturdy slate for hostile environments and factory floors, Dell's Latitude 7030 scores high for its screen, cameras, and optional keyboard. Its 10.1-inch display isn't too small, but its batteries might be.

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Dell Latitude 7030 Rugged Extreme Review (2024)

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