Except probably for battery life, you can skip the benchmarks section of this review. Our usual performance scores, especially things like the 3DMark graphics and gaming simulation, simply aren't all that relevant to the Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme (starts at $1,899; $3,197 as tested). What's relevant is toughness—this 11.6-inch Windows tablet is designed to be used outside in crummy conditions, getting wet and getting dropped and used with gloves on when it's freezing cold. It carries an ingress protection rating of IP65, meaning it's immune to dust and sandstorms and spray from most water nozzles, though not immersion in water. It's bulky and heavy and ready to communicate over LTE mobile broadband when Wi-Fi is miles away. If Microsoft's Surface Pro was exposed to gamma radiation and got angry, it would be the Latitude 7220.
A Burly Black Slab
The 7220 is the successor to the Latitude 7212 Rugged Extreme that won an Editors' Choice in January 2018 and, until early 2020, still starred in our roundup of the best rugged laptops. It measures the same 0.96 by 12.3 by 8 inches, though it's a few ounces lighter at 2.93 pounds without its optional keyboard cover. Like the 7212, it's rated to survive temperatures from -20 degrees F to 145 degrees F, a four-foot drop when switched off, and a three-foot drop during use.
The $1,899 base model teams a Core i3-8145U processor with 8GB of memory, a 128GB NVMe solid-state drive, and Windows 10 Pro. The display is a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) touch screen with an anti-glare, anti-smudge Gorilla Glass top layer and 1,000 nits of brightness for use in outdoor sunshine. There's a 5-megapixel face recognition webcam for Windows Hello logins and an 8-megapixel rear camera.
For $3,197, my test unit piled on the options including a quad-core, 1.9GHz (4.8GHz turbo) Core i7-8665U chip, the maximum 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD (the top choice is 2TB), the backlit keyboard cover, an active stylus pen, 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) instead of 802.11ac networking, Qualcomm mobile broadband with an AT&T SIM card, and dual hot-swappable batteries. Dell also offers a rigid carrying handle and Havis vehicle dashboard dock.
The slate is clad in matte black polycarbonate plastic with rubberized bumpers on the corners. The screen bezels are thick. A sliding shutter on the top edge blocks the webcam if you're concerned about online snoops, while buttons below the screen let you brighten or dim the display, raise or lower audio volume, toggle auto-rotate between portrait and landscape, or use programmable shortcuts. (Programming the buttons and fast access to a variety of settings is provided by a Rugged Control Center utility or onscreen taskbar you download from the Dell support site. Another utility lets you configure the touch screen for finger, glove, or rainy operation.)
The removable kickstand, secured by an anchored plastic screw (a dime or thumbnail will do if you don't have a screwdriver handy), props the tablet at almost any angle. There's absolutely no wobble if you tap the screen while the Dell's propped up. The keyboard cover snaps magnetically onto the bottom edge of the tablet, though its hold is too weak to let you pick up the heavy slate by the keyboard. It folds upward to cover the screen.
Use and Abuse
The ports on the Latitude 7220's right edge (when you're holding the tablet in landscape mode) are hidden by tight-fitting covers. They consist of an AC adapter connector, a mini RS-232 serial port for data collection devices, a USB Type-C port with DisplayPort functionality, a USB 3.1 Type-A port with device charging, a microSD card slot, and an audio jack. A Kensington security lock slot is on the left side. You won't find an HDMI, an Ethernet, or a Thunderbolt 3 port.
A passive stylus pen, secured by a stretchy tether, fits into a niche on the top edge. On the flip side of the tablet are a fingerprint reader, a SmartCard reader, a slide to cover the rear camera lens, and the two 34WHr batteries, which you can unlatch and swap out with the kickstand removed.
Both the front and rear cameras default to 1080p but can capture fairly bright and sharp images at up to 2,592 by 1,944 and 3,264 by 2,448 resolution respectively. You're not going to use the Rugged Extreme Tablet as a boombox while you hike through warehouses or disaster areas, but its single speaker can pump out relatively loud and clear audio, perhaps a bit hollow but even letting me hear overlapping tracks in my MP3s.
The screen offers ample brightness and contrast—turned all the way up, it inevitably washes out somewhat in direct outdoor sunlight, but remains legible. Used indoors or after dark, it's a pleasure to look at, with dazzling white backgrounds and crisp text. Colors don't exactly pop but are clear and well saturated, and fine details look sharp.
Since it's designed to work even when you're wearing gloves, the Latitude's touch screen obliges you to press harder and drag slower than you're probably used to from other tablets or laptops. The same goes for the keyboard cover's smallish two-button touchpad. But with practice, both work pretty well. I experienced just a bit of lag and palm marking while using the tethered passive pen, but nothing intolerable; users who anticipate a lot of pen input may want to try the battery-powered PN720R active pen that Dell sent, which kept up with my fastest swoops and scribbles with good palm rejection (but is at somewhat more risk of getting lost).
Like other tablets with kickstands and keyboard covers, the 7220 is much happier and better balanced on a desk or table than in your lap. That said, the Dell's $349.99 cover is above average, with four levels of RGB backlighting in customizable colors. Top-row keys like Escape and Delete are small, and you must team the Fn key with the left and right cursor arrows for Home and End (though there are dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys). But the typing feel is surprisingly good, with adequate travel and snappy feedback.
A high-pressure hose will drown it, as will being immersed or submerged, but the Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet is undaunted by splashes, spills, or heavy rain. I ran it under the kitchen faucet and nothing bad happened; I didn't even need to summon the screen utility and select wet rather than normal touch operation.
As for a different kind of spill, I dropped the turned-off tablet onto its back and edges several times from a height of about four feet. Each time it booted and ran fine, so I dropped it from about three feet while it was running. That didn't hurt it, either, though the keyboard cover came off once. I wouldn't recommend running over the tablet with a truck or hurling it against a rock wall, but it's clearly ready to accompany first responders in the field. Indeed, its cellular data link is compatible with the FirstNet private network for first responders and its priority Band 14 spectrum.
Performance: Apples and Oranges
The Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme's best-known competitor as a rugged detachable tablet is the Panasonic Toughbook 33, which we tested in October 2017 using an older set of benchmarks, so I can't provide a direct comparison here. Instead, I chose two rugged laptops that share its nearly invincible IP65 rating: Both Panasonic's Toughbook 31 and Dell's Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme are built to shrug off six-foot falls. The remaining two slots in our benchmark charts go to much lighter, non-rugged tablets from Lenovo and Microsoft. You can see the contenders' basic specs in the table below.
Except for would-be gamers, an even less likely audience than music aficionados, the 7220 proved to be a strong performer (so strong that I suspect most customers would be satisfied with a Core i5 rather than my Core i7 configuration).
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are performance suites developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive.
It's not destined to see much Excel and PowerPoint duty, but the Dell tablet easily cleared the 4,000 points we consider an excellent score in PCMark 10, and its SSD joined the others in breezing through the PCMark 8 storage measurement.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which makes use of all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image. It yields a score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
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Microsoft's Surface Pro 7 excelled here, but the 7220 more than held its own. It went on to win another multithreaded, CPU-dependent contest, our Handbrake video editing exercise, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file.
In another timed test, we use the 2018 Creative Cloud release of the image editing favorite Adobe Photoshop to apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
The Rugged Extreme Tablet captured the gold medal once again. Field workers and first responders may not use it to manage their photo collections, but they'll certainly use its rear camera to capture images at job or trouble sites, then attach the keyboard cover to write up reports.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering multiple highly detailed, gaming-style animations. Both of the 3DMark subtests we run, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but the latter is more demanding and lets systems with dedicated graphics strut their stuff.
The Dell slate joined the many laptops we've tested with Intel integrated graphics—in other words, its score was pathetically short of what's required for serious gaming.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test. Like 3DMark, Unigine Corp.'s Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, in this case using 720p Low and 1080p High resolution and image quality presets. These scores are reported in frames per second (fps), with 30fps a minimum for smooth gameplay and 60fps more desirable.
Of course, these tests are an academic exercise. You wouldn't ask a Honda Civic to compete in the Indy 500, and you wouldn't ask the Latitude 7220 to play video games.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the tablet or laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode), turn off Wi-Fi, and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged rundown test. We then loop a 720p video file with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
Its dual batteries kept the Dell 7220 tablet on the job for an impressive 17 hours. (Even with just one battery installed, the slate lasted for a respectable nine hours and change.) Real-world use with screen brightness turned up will be briefer, but you can safely take this tablet where there's no AC outlet in sight.
It Won't Wimp Out
The Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet is, quite literally, a piece of work. Everything from its 1,000-nit screen to its typist-friendly keyboard cover testifies to its thoughtful, top-quality engineering, and if you can break it, you have my utmost respect. Of course it's costly and hefty and wild overkill for most usage cases, but it more than deserves to replace its model 7212 predecessor as an Editors' Choice. Thank you for your service, Dell.
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