Dell’s Venue 8 7000 series review

Normally when you think of Android tablets, you don’t think of Dell, and neither did I.

They start the 2015 on a pretty hot note, with their first entry into the high-priced mid-size Android tablet category with the Dell’s Venue 8 7000. So obviously the design is the number one thing that’s gonna stand out here.

First of all it’s the world’s thinnest tablet – it’s 6 mm thin, although not exactly sure that’s a good thing though. The Dell Venue have a square edge design and being thicker wouldn’t make any more difficult to hold or anything, and actually it’s kinda hard to pick it up of a flat table, and that’s why I wouldn’t mind being a little bit thicker or rounded to house an extra battery but that all me. The Dell’s Venue 8 is super thin, and when you take a step back this mid-size tablet is in a weird way kinda beautiful.

The trends in the mid-size tablet market are that these tablets are getting more beautiful and powerful, and this is in addition to both those trends. It’s rockin 8.4 inch 2560 by 1600 Oled display, and it is beautiful. You can see in the picture below that this is maybe one of the best-looking tablet displays I’ve ever seen. It’s 16×9 so it handles videos well, movies look fantastic and that’s really what these tablets are all about – media consumption and also gaming. Gaming on the Dell Venue looks really good but only if you can get past the weird grip ergonomic and the one-sided speaker, this is about as good as games can look on Android tablet. Super bright, colorful, vivid, saturated, great viewing angles and so on. With all these pixels gaming performance is also very impressive but I’m playing casual games on my mobile devices. Past gaming all these pixels tend to make near stock Android elements look pretty small but also very sharp.

Everyday performance with this tablet is great, and the added Dell and Intel experience is close to stock Android, so nothing too crazy like a heavy skin or something.

The Dell’s Venue 8 7000 includes 16GB of internal storage, but really only 9.30GB of total space is available to the end user. Dell made sure to squeeze a micro SD slot into this ultra-thin tablet, and that’s fantastic. The Dell Venue 8 7000 supports up to 512GB of extra storage space, which is great, but the limited local space of less than 10GB is something you need to know. The Venue have inside it an Intel Atom quad core processor at 2.30 gigahertz and 2 gigs of RAM. Combine all that with this beautiful 2k display, and you have the perfect recipe for a great multimedia experience.

The tablet has three camera sensors on the back that are pretty much impossible to take a picture without locking them somehow but they are supposed to combine an 8 megapixel photos together and also to record depth information, using Intel’s real sense technology (it might remind you of what the HTC One M8 did with it’s dual camera). Come on, seriously? I don’t know how many of you use your tablets out there for taking pictures but I’m pretty sure that you ain’t that much.

In the end of the day – is this one of the more head-turning, interesting looking Android tablets out there? The answer is simple – Yes. It’s a risk what Dell did here – big thumbs up for that. Yes, it’s not necessarily my favorite design and I still think there are better ways to do a mid-sized tablet but I’m glad that Dell took the risk with the Venue 8 because taking risks is a good thing. That being said I wouldn’t recommend this as my first choice for tablet in this mid-size category. There are still things like the Nexus 9 and even the NVidia Shield Tablet. I think they’re all better buys for this approximate mid-size and price, and talking about price I think if it was 100$ bucks less – I would have recommend it. But if you can find it with a discounted price and you enjoy watching movies, videos and playing games on crisp and sharp display – go for it, however that depends on how much you weight that against other things.

This was the Dell Venue 8 7000 and if you enjoyed reading this review feel free to subscribe, or leave a comment below and to share with us what you think.