It’s finally arrived!

I was getting to the point of wondering if it would ever get here or if it would stay in the limbo land between the factory and the courier in the UK.

I’ve had it a couple of days now and did the usual charging process (1st charge to full while setting it up etc.). I’ve since used it for around 5hrs on battery and at 12% decided to do the 2nd charge. I’ve been installing bits and pieces and just doing general setup steps so no doubt the battery will last better from now on.

All in all, I’m mighty impressed by the XPS 15! Despite being 2kg in weight, it doesn’t feel that heavy at all, and it sits nice on the lap. I’m definitely glad I didn’t jump for the XPS 12 when it was on offer the other week anyway as I think it might have been a bit small.

My only complaint so far has been with the keyboard. The main concern was having to use the Fn key to use the Function keys as F1, F2 etc. but that was easily corrected by pressing Fn+Esc which toggles Fn Lock. Secondly, the keys have less travel to what I’m used to, but I’m slowly getting used to that.

The screen is just superb with good colours and contrast although the resolution is perhaps a little high for Windows. Apple seem to get away with it quite well with OSX on the retina MacBooks, but Windows (while massively improved for high DPI support in Windows 8.1) still has room for improvement. Visual Studio works very well, but because Windows rescales things for the higher resolution, the amount of visible code seems less than I would have seen on a 1080p resolution. That said, I can tweak that setting until I find my best fit.

I’ll no doubt post more about the XPS when I’ve used it for over a week. Hopefully it continues in a similar theme to this one as I’m liking the laptop so far and hope that’s how it will stay.