The affordable and entry-level mid-range notebook segment is chock-full of SKUs and variants from every PC brand out there. It’s an ocean and choosing your device can become very confusing. Of course, your eyes and brain might naturally gravitate towards the more renowned notebook series such as Dell’s Inspiron lineup or HP Pavilion, because of how long they have been around — I remember seeing these brands back in the late 90s — but there are plenty of options these days in the affordable segment, which makes the buying decision that much harder.

As you can see one or two things stick out as being holdouts from another era, such as the 5400 RPM spinning HDD, which could drastically hamper performance. We will get into that later in the review. For the above configuration, Dell’s asking price is Rs 48,990 plus 18% GST, which is just about par for the course in the entry-level mid-tier segment.

Dell Inspiron 5480 Design & Build Quality

Like I mentioned above, I really like the overall look and handling feel of the Dell Inspiron 5480. The laptop is very easy to tote around, and you can even carry it one-handed without hurting your wrists, if you have your hands full otherwise. The light-gray silver color is not too flashy, and fits right in any office, and the same color runs along the side for a more seamless look, unlike the Dell XPS lineup, which has a clear difference on the side.

Dell Inspiron 5480 Ports & Connectivity

When it comes to ports, Dell isn’t limited by the thin form factor, so there’s plenty of room to fit a lot of I/O options. Dell doesn’t disappoint and you have everything you need here. On the right, you will find a full-sized SD Card Reader, along with a USB 2.0 port, RJ45 Ethernet jack, which uses a hinge-style port, and a wedge lock slot.

While the panel on the Inspiron 5480 is bright and has a great viewing angles, I found it to be a bit lacking in terms of dexterity and text rendering. For example, I use the Win+D shortcut practically every 20 minutes to access files from the desktop, and also as a way to fidget around during my thinking process. In the Inspiron 5480, the display takes a fraction longer to show the text in the right place. There’s some text ghosting before this happens. It’s a bit jarring as you can see in this clip below:

Other than this annoyance, the display on the Inspiron 5480 is really good. The narrow bezels lend a modern feel to the panel and it’s nice to see this trend coming to the affordable and mid-range segment as well. The ‘chin’ or the area below the display is quite large though, so it’s a bit like cheating if you ask us.

When it comes to brightness and usage under sunlight, the Inspiron 5480 does just about as well as the competition in this segment. You won’t find that rich contrast in bright sunlight, but you can definitely use it. There’s some color shifting at the wider viewing angles when using it in sunlight, so it’s not the best for group usage outdoors.

I was expecting some great performance from the Inspiron 5480, as the 8th Gen Intel Whiskey Lake processors are amazing value and offer excellent everyday performance. The Core i5 8265U processor is a quad-core power-efficient chip and produced in 14nm process (14nm++) and offer higher clock speeds than Kaby Lake, which introduce quad-core ultrabook processors. The i5-8265U offers a Turbo clock speed of 3.9 GHz for single core (3.8 for two cores, 3.7 GHz for all four cores) and had the Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated. Our particular unit comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM as well.

If anything the i5-8265U should be faster as the benchmarks indicate. In nearly every benchmark, the 8265U is better than the 8250U, offering up to 15 percent improved performance with more power savings. In PassMark, the Core i5-8265U comes in with an average score of 8,180, which is just a bit better than the Core i5-8250U, which hovers around the 7,600 mark. It also offers better single-thread performance, which is crucial for home and office productivity apps. It also offers up to 7-10 percent faster quad-core performance, even in Turbo.

The 14-inch notebook form factor is the middle-child in the laptop world – they can’t get a full-sized keyboard, and the just barely wider footprint than a 13-inch laptop means a more cramped-feeling keyboard, without the ultraportability of the 13-incher.

With a 42wHr unit, we didn’t expect outstanding battery life from the Dell Inspiron 5480. But it delivers a solid 6-7 hours of usage in good 70-80% brightness with all the wireless connectivity options on. That’s good enough in our estimate for continuous usage, and you will easily get enough to squeeze out 8-plus hours with a wired connection and at lower brightness.

Here’s a sum up of what we liked about the Inspirion 5480 entry-level mid-ranger and what didn’t quite get our thumbs-up.

  • Pleasant design and build quality
  • Bright display with narrow bezels
  • Excellent keyboard and trackpad
  • Lots of ports and Type-C charging
  • Fingerprint reader

Cons

  • A bit chunky
  • Terrible performance with default HDD
  • Slow display
  • Middling battery life
  • Slightly pricier than rivals

Dell Inspiron 5480: Best Entry-Level Mid-Ranger?

We can’t attest to the performance of the many other laptops in this price range, but we have tested the latest direct competition from Asus. Many of Dell’s competitors have options at a lower price than Rs 55,000+ price tag of the Inspiron 5480.

The VivoBook X505, powered by the AMD Ryzen 5 2500U, and priced at around Rs 37,000, is an obvious alternative and we can vouch for the Ryzen 5 performance as well. It’s got better graphics performance too thanks to the Vega 8 integrated graphics. If you are wondering this too had a spinning HDD.