According to our colorimeter, the Latitude 7490 reproduces 118 percent of the sRGB spectrum -- a measurement that rises above the 113-percent premium-notebook average. It's close to the 124-percent rating from the Huawei MateBook X Pro and the 114-percent rating from the HP EliteBook 1040 G4. The Lenovo ThinkPad T480 posted a less-colorful 77 percent. The Latitude 7490 could stand to be brighter; it produced up to 277 nits, which falls below the 300-nit category average. The 269-nit ThinkPad T480 and the 278-nit EliteBook 1040 G4 are similarly bright, while the 458-nit MateBook X Pro is far brighter. While the Latitude 7490's matte screen helps reduce glare, the panel isn't bright enough for its colors to not invert when viewed at 30 degrees to the left and right. The 256GB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD in the Latitude 7490 duplicated 4.97GB of multimedia files in 17 seconds, for a rate of 299.36 MBps. That's faster than the 277.5 MBps premium-notebook average, the 282.73 MBps from the MateBook X Pro (512GB NVMe PCIe SSD), the 267 MBps from the ThinkPad T480 (256GB NVMe PCIe SSD) and the 282.7 MBps from the EliteBook 1040 G4 (512GB PCIe NVMe TLC SSD). The Dell Latitude 7490's got the speed you need (and then some), a keyboard that's comfortable enough for writing all day long and a battery that supports a full 8-hour workday. If only the display were brighter and it managed heat better.

Dell Latitude 7490 review | TechRadar Dell Latitude 7490 review | TechRadar

The Intel Core i5-8350U quad-core CPU is rapidly becoming the darling of laptop designers. It delivers much of the power that the Intel Core i7-8550U offers but has a lower unit cost and a less detrimental impact on battery life. The included Waves MaxxAudio Pro sound utility allows you to disable its sound-boosting presets, but I recommend you leave it as is. You'll see options for adjusting width, detail and bass, but the default settings are just right.The ports haven’t changed at all from the 7480 series, with triple USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A ports and a single Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C. There is also an RJ-45 Ethernet port, Smart Card slot, microSD card and SIM card receptacles. The Latitude 7490 finished our HandBrake video transcoding test (converting a 4K video to 1080p) in 21 minutes and 35 seconds, which is only slightly shorter than the 22:11 category average. The MateBook X Pro (27:18) took longer, and the ThinkPad T480 (18:09) took less time. That’s the other weakness of this design, but it shares this limitation with every Intel 8th-gen machine of whatever specification. Once again, we come away from a Dell Latitude 7000 series machine thoroughly impressed. Along with Lenovo’s ThinkPads and HP’s EliteBooks, the Latitudes stand head and shoulders above the rest of the business competition. They’re thoughtfully designed, smartly updated, and carefully revised. While the 7490 remains a mere iterative update to the 7480 in every sense of the term, it truly leaves little to be desired. The case is sturdy, subdued, and attractive, the weight is manageable, the input devices are top-notch, performance is very good, battery life is lengthy, and it’s a quiet companion. The few areas of improvement we’d like to see are display options to match its competitors, improved thermal management, and better speakers. The review machine didn’t have the LTE module to make use of the SIM slot, and as the standard for these isn’t a global one, the options for the LTE hardware will be different around the world.

Latitude 7490 Business Laptop | Dell USA Latitude 7490 Business Laptop | Dell USA

Ergonomically, this is one of the smaller machines in this category, if only by a few millimeters. There are smaller machines, like the Lenovo X1 Carbon, but this device is certainly very portable. The integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU in the Dell Latitude 7490 pushed it to an Ice Storm Unlimited graphics test score of 87,894, which beats the 83,013 average and the 84,917 from the EliteBook 1040 G4 (Intel Integrated Graphics 630). We saw higher scores of 116,359 from the MateBook X Pro (Nvidia MX150 with 2GB of memory) and 132,991 from the ThinkPad T480 (Intel HD Graphics 620). The ease of the disassembly process has not changed since our last review; some eight captive Phillips Head screws secure the bottom cover, and nearly every replaceable component is available immediately beneath the panel. One gripe which still applies here is that the keyboard is among the hardest of all FRUs to replace since it’s beneath the motherboard—though this is unfortunately a pretty common trend these days thanks to the thinness of the devices populating even the business segment (which are more and more akin to their consumer-grade counterparts as the years pass). There’s also an adhesive lining the LCD panel to help keep a consistent seal between the bezel and display that’s perilous during disassembly. In the event of a broken screen, technicians will need to take care to separate the bezel and panel surround without damaging anything.Dell used an Intel 545s M.2 SATA drive in the review hardware, and on paper, it looks fine. But in some of our writing tests, it didn’t perform that well, and the IOPS it delivers don’t compare favorably with those you’d get from a Corsair or Western Digital.