How is battery life in the Dell Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1?

Can you push eight hours from a charge?

More hours of life from a battery is always preferred, but hitting eight hours is a workday milestone that means you can leave your charger behind when leaving home.

Under what we consider normal conditions, including display brightness at about 50% and the power plan set to "better battery," the Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1 with 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8565U CPU hit about seven hours from a charge. During the test, it was used for word processing, heavy web browsing, video streaming, and messaging. On the "better battery" setting it handled everything we threw its way, and if you're not worried about a bit of lag, you could intermittently drop things down to battery saver to extend battery life.

This is a convertible laptop, so it's assumed you will be using the touch display, but if you're in a pinch it can be disabled with relative ease. This can add more than a few minutes of battery life, though you won't be able to use your active pen.

Dell also now offers an Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1 with 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10510U "Comet Lake" CPU and otherwise similar hardware and design. Battery size is the exact same, and you should expect similar battery life with a slight boost to overall performance compared to the 8th Gen Intel hardware. It does have a Thunderbolt 3 port instead of just USB-C 3.1, and you get the added benefit of Wi-Fi 6 thanks to 10th Gen Intel tech.

It'd be great to see well more than eight hours of life from this splendid little laptop without having to pull out any stops, but that's just not the case. Luckily, if you are leaving home, the 65W adapter won't take up too much room in your bag. And if you're concerned about not having access to a wall outlet for a quick charge, you can always add a Dell Power Bank Plus to your repertoire for charging on the go. It essentially adds another 65Wh battery for the Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1 to run off of, and it includes two USB-A ports on top of the connection back to your laptop for charging other accessories.

How fast does the Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1 charge?

With the standard 65W adapter that comes with the Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1, the 52Wh battery inside goes from dead to about 80% in an hour. This is a pretty standard fast charging capability, and it's handy to have if you're on a time crunch and don't have much time to sit around with the laptop plugged in.

What can you do to boost battery life?

On top of disabling the touch display, there are several methods you can try out to boost battery life. Not all methods will necessarily work with the Inspiron 13 (7390) 2-in-1, but we've put together a guide you can reference if you really need to eke out every minute of life from the battery.