What’s This?
2013-11-27 12:00:39 UTC
You get what you pay for. Take Exhibit A: budget tablets. It’s not easy to cover up deficiencies in design and performance in an all-screen, all-touch device.
The Dell Venue 8 with an 8-inch HD screen, due in stores the first week of December in either black or red, starts at $ 179.99. Like other sub-$ 200 tablets, Dell was forced to cut corners and thus produced a tablet with a sub-standard touch experience, sub-standard camera and sub-standard battery life.
See also: 5 Ways To Boost Productivity With Your Tablet
Pay less and you’ll get less. The Venue 8 costs $ 100 less than the 8-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and $ 120 less than the original 7.9-inch iPad mini.
Each of these 8-inch tables share fairly similar specs, but the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and iPad mini are both worth the triple-digit difference. Dell missed an delicious opportunity with the Venue 8 to make a strong re-entry into the tablet market.
The 8-Inch Difference
Even though the Venue 8 is larger and heavier than its two other primary 8-inch competitors, dimensional ergonomics isn’t exactly a huge issue at this size. The iPad mini measures 7.87 x 5.3 x .28 inches and clocks in at 0.68 pounds; the Galaxy Tab 3 measures 8.26 x 4.87 x 0.29 inches at 0.73 pounds; the Venue 8 measures 8.35 x 5.11 x .37 inches and weighs 0.77 pounds.
All three tablets easily slide vertically into a jacket pocket, where the size and weight differences are negligible, especially if you add a Smart Cover to the iPad mini. On any of the three, you’ll most likely finish any tablet activity before your hand or arm gets tired holding it up.
Where Dell beats Apple and Samsung, though, is with the Venue’s matte back rear, which is more comfortable to grip and less apt to be marred just by putting it down. Overall, Venue’s heft and obvious build-quality extend a surer sense of solidity compared to its daintier competitors.
Dell starts to skimp by incorporating only a single bottom rim speaker rather than the bottom stereo speakers found on the iPad mini and the Galaxy Tab. And all fail to provide front-facing sound.
A Battery With Much to be Desired
Both Dell and Samsung saved some cash by installing less-than-cutting-edge processors; Venue employs Intel’s 2.06 GHz dual Atom processor and the Galaxy Tab is equipped with Samsung’s own 1.5 GHz dual core Exynos 4212. The brain in the original iPad mini, of course, is Apple’s A5 chip, which is now two generations old and suddenly underwhelming.
All three 8-inch tablets start with 16GB of user memory, but Dell only charges an extra $ 20 for double that in the Venue 8. By comparison, jumping from 16GB to 32GB with Apple will set you back a whopping $ 130, and Samsung doesn’t even offer a higher-capacity version. Of course, both the Venue and the Galaxy include microSD card slots for DIY memory expansion.
Both Android tablets run Android 4.2.2, but Venue’s 2GB of RAM tops Samsung 1.5GB, although it’s nearly impossible to detect a performance differences in everyday usage.
Where Venue completely falls short is battery life. It lasts only about 7.5 hours compared to Galaxy Tab’s 9-plus hours and the mini’s 10-plus hours. Dell must know Venue’s battery life isn’t exactly a selling point; instead of noting rated life in its Battery specs, Dell simply says “integrated.”
Left in the Dark
You get seemingly identical WXGA 1200 x 800 pixel displays on both the Venue and Galaxy Tab. You can hardly read the tiny text on either tablet, but it’s a bit easier to make out than on iPad Mini’s 1024 x 764 screen (hence the need for an iPad mini with Retina).
The Galaxy Tab’s screen is slightly brighter than the Venue’s, with a tad more contrast, but you would only see that during a side-by-side inspection. Just remember to turn off the useless automatic brightness in the Display settings on both to get optimum illumination.
While you see a brighter image with higher contrast on the Galaxy Tab, Venue’s colors are more natural. The flesh tones on the Galaxy bend more toward a John Boehner orange hue. Neither 8-inch tablet offers the mini’s superior brightness, contrast or color competency.
Venue’s 8-inch screen also short-sheets you. Venue’s navigation controls (back, home, menu) are located on the bottom half-inch of the display instead of the bezel while you’re in a web browser, reading an e-book or any other activity that takes up the entire screen. So you’re actually getting a 7.5-inch screen.
Overly Touchy
The pros and cons of screen color and contrast are tiny quibbles compared to the issues with Venue’s touchscreen.
Being described as “touchy” usually isn’t a good thing. While neither the Venue nor the Galaxy Tab offer scrolling as seamless as the mini, Venue’s screen is just about as sensitive as a sunburn to the touch.
While scrolling through a Twitter feed, my scroll touch kept accidentally opening individual tweets when I simply wanted to continue moving up or down the stream. Often, the scroll slipped inexplicably into a scary spasmodic jitter, mysteriously shifting my place in the feed.
When I double-tapped an article in my browser on the Venue, the zoomed version refused to stay within its defined full-screen confines. Web articles on Venue’s screen aimlessly shifted from left to right while I scrolled up and down, seemingly of its own accord. This didn’t happen all the time, but enough to be noticeably frustrating.
Conversely, sometimes Venue wasn’t responsive enough. Icons or text often needed a second or third tap to activate.
Camera Fail
No tablet maker, including Apple, seems to care much about providing a camera as advanced as a smartphone’s. Venue’s 5 MP rear imager, which boasts the same resolution as the iPad mini and Galaxy Tab, is particularly disappointing.
Let’s start with Dell’s placement of the rear camera lens in the middle-side instead in of a corner. This makes it far easier to accidentally cover by a stray finger. Plus, Venue’s display didn’t display a crisp viewfinder image. Scenes I was about to shoot always appeared dark and fuzzy.
Unlike the Galaxy Tab, the Venue lacks touch focus, macro mode, self-timer and scene modes. It provides nothing but a bear-bones shooter.
The icing on the cake is the shutter, which is a disaster. Unlike the near-instance snap-and-capture on the mini and Tab, you must hold the Venue perfectly still for around 3 to 4 seconds to capture the image (hopefully, your subject will stay perfectly still, too). To view a photo you just snapped, you must exit the camera app and go to the gallery; no snapped photo preview is available.
I discovered that about one-third of all the indoor photos in my gallery were blurry, either because I didn’t hold the Venue quite still enough or the subjects within the frame moved. My non-blurry indoor photos were dark and grainy with hardly any clarity.
In other words, Venue’s camera is nearly useless. Combined with the tablet’s erratic touch response and below-average battery life, this prospective bargain tablet turns out to be no bargain at all.
The Lowdown
The Good
The Bad
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Barely functional camera
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Poor touch response
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Short battery life
Bottom Line: Even though Dell’s Venue 8 tablet undercuts similar 8-inch offerings from Apple and Samsung by more than $ 100, its oddly overly-sensitive touch screen, nearly useless camera and short battery life result in a magnificent misfire.
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Images: Mashable, Stewart Wolpin
Topics: apple, dell, dell venue 8, Gadgets, iPad Mini, Mobile, reviews, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, tablets, Tech
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