Five years ago, the first of what we would call modern tablet computers were released to the world. What is now an entire product category was originally seen with massive skepticism by many consumers, analysts, and journalists. Even those who had high hopes for the future of tablets could not have predicted their meteoric rise in popularity and ubiquity.

Although tablets are still derided by many as being useless for productivity work, there are many cases where a consumer has been able to not just supplement, but replace their traditional computer with a tablet. Of course, as tablets made by companies in the mobile space replace traditional computers, the producers of those computers are faced with a problem of maintaining profit and relevance. The inevitable move was for PC companies to produce their own tablets to compete with their new competition.

This brings us to the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet, also known as the Dell Venue 8 7840. Although there have been other Venue 8 tablets, for the remainder of the review I will refer to the Dell Venue 8 7840 as the Venue 8 as the full name is quite long and there shouldn't be any risk of confusion with older Venue 8 tablets. Dell is actually not a brand new player in the tablet space, nor are they new to the mobile space.

Some people may remember the Dell Streak 5, which was a 5" phone that could be called one of the first phablets on the market. However, Dell is still not a well known player in the mobile space despite their previous attempts to break into it. On paper, the Venue 8 has all the attributes required of a flagship tablet, but whether or not it's enough to make Dell a serious contender remains to be seen. Before discussing the design of the Venue 8, I've laid out its specifications below to give an overview of how the Venue 8 stacks up to the competition.

	Dell Venue 8 7840
SoC	Intel Atom Z3580 Moorefield quad core Atom with 2.33GHz burst speed, PowerVR G6430
RAM/NAND	2GB LPDDR3, 16GB NAND + microSDXC
Display	8.4" 2560x1600 AMOLED
Dimensions	215.8 x 124.4 x 6.0 mm, 306g
Camera	8MP Rear Facing + 2x 720p Depth Cameras 2MP Front Facing
Battery	5900mAh (21Wh)
OS	Android 4.4.4 KitKat
Connectivity	1x1 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.0 , USB2.0 LTE SKU Available
Price	Starting at $399

As you can see, the Venue 8 is a high end device in most areas, at least when evaluated on paper. The limited storage configuration of 16GB is one of the few question marks, though the microSD slot helps; the GPU is also going to be potentially limiting. Note that Dell also offers an optional wireless keyboard/case as an accessory. The rest of the review will determine how well these specifications translate into a good real world experience, but before jumping into the technical details it's important to discuss the design and ergonomics of the Venue 8.

One big selling point for the Venue 8 is that it's currently the thinnest tablet in the world according to Dell. Both Apple and Sony have tablet offerings that are 6.1mm thick, but Dell has shaved off that decimal point and made a tablet that is exactly 6mm thick across the entire chassis. I can't really tell the difference between the thickness of the Venue 8 and the iPad Air 2, but both devices are remarkably thin. The Venue 8 feels even more impressive than the iPad at times because it's smaller and significantly lighter in addition to being thinner. The bulk of the chassis is made of aluminum, with a small plastic region at the bottom to house the speakers and camera. The whole device feels great in the hand, and the aluminum feels solid and sturdy.

However, there is a unique aspect of the Venue 8's design that needs to be addressed, which are the unconventional bezel proportions and speaker positioning. On most tablets, you'll see a bezel of equal width on every side, or a a pair of equal bezels on the top of bottom, and a pair of equal thinner bezels on the left and right sides that are thinner than those on the top and bottom. The Venue 8 with its Infinity Display instead opts to use very thin bezels of equal width on the top, left, and right, and a thicker bezel on the bottom. This is necessary to provide space for the various circuitry and display drivers that are required. In addition, Dell has placed the front-facing camera and a pair of stereo speakers in a section beneath bottom bezel.

This leads to an unconventional and unfortunately unbalanced bezel design, and it can cause some issues when holding the tablet. In portrait mode the fact that there's a larger bezel and a speaker at the bottom of the tablet doesn't pose much of an issue, but in landscape mode it makes it uncomfortable to hold. It's hard to hold the Venue 8 in landscape without it feeling uneven. This is exacerbated by the fact that the bezel on top of the tablet is extremely thin.

The thinness of the other bezels can also pose their own issues with having fingers rest on the display. When Apple first used asymmetric bezels on an iPad with the iPad Mini, they tweaked the touch rejection in iOS to account for the fact that fingers were more likely to be resting on the display. Android has no such accommodation, and there have been instances where I find myself unable to scroll or accidentally zooming because one of my other fingers is resting on the display and being detected as touch input.

Overall, I think the Venue 8 is a well designed device with exceptional build quality. It feels remarkably thin and light in the hand, and its flat edges are visually striking while still remaining ergonomic due to the tablet's thinness. The aluminum construction also ensures that there's not even the slightest bit of flex to the chassis. Like every device, it's imperfect. The bezel design is visually impressive, but hampered by technological limitations and some software issues. I also have mixed feelings about the camera placements. Despite its issues, the Venue 8 still remains a tablet that both looks and feels like a premium device.

CPU Performance

The Venue 8 is a unique device among the Android devices that we have tested. While most Android smartphones and tablets employ ARM based SoCs, Dell has opted to use Intel's Atom Z3580 processor. Z3580 is part of Intel's Moorefield line, built on Intel's 22nm process and sporting four Silvermont cores with a max burst frequency of 2.33GHz. To test CPU performance we turn to our standard web based benchmarks, along with Basemark OS II. For our 2015 benchmark suite we've removed Sunspider as it's become too much of an optimization target.

The Z3580 performs very well in all of our web based benchmarks. Its scores are in the same range as devices with Apple's A8 and NVIDIA's Tegra K1 which currently hold the best scores of the devices we've tested.

The performance in Basemark OS II is a mixed bag when compared to the consistently good results from our web benchmarks. We see fairly good performance in the web and memory sections of the benchmark, but less impressive scores in the system and graphics categories. This leads to an overall score that sits in the middle of the results from other devices we've tested.

Whether a tablet's performance is acceptable or not will often be based largely on how much the tablet costs. Class leading performance can't really be expected from inexpensive tablets, and for expensive ones having class leading performance is a must. At $399, the Venue 8 is priced at the same point as the Nexus 9, and it trades blows with it across our different tests. With generational improvements to their processors, it's not hard to imagine Intel becoming a major performance leader in the mobile space. Performance isn't the only metric considered when a manufacturer is deciding on the processor for their device, but I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing more design wins for Intel in the future.

Device Performance

A device's performance in benchmarks is a fairly objective measurement of performance, but it may not necessarily be representative of how a device actually feels to a user. Issues with performance in the real world can fall under many categories, which range from long loading times to stutters and sluggish framerates. The "jank" that has historically existed on Android devices has typically fallen under the latter category rather than the former. With each iteration of Android, Google has made improvements to this perceived smoothness in the Android interface. The recently released Android Lollipop brought large increases to framerates in many key areas, but the Venue 8 ships with KitKat and can not take advantage of them.

Unfortunately, the Android 4.4 KitKat experience on the Venue 8 is not always as free from jank as one would expect based on its CPU performance. Many issues manifest themselves as stutters or drops in framerate, even in common animations like bring down the notification shade and rotating the device. Turning on any live wallpapers is also guaranteed to bring the animations in the launcher well below 60fps, and even below 30fps. Many scrolling lists also suffer from the jank that was commonly seen on pre-Lollipop versions of Android. It's unfortunate that the Venue 8 didn't ship with Lollipop, as I don't think I would have to discuss performance issues like these if it had. Hopefully a Lollipop update arrives for the Venue 8 soon.

GPU Performance

GPU performance is another important aspect of a device, and with display resolutions increasing there is always a need for more GPU power to drive more pixels. In the eyes of many consumers, Intel is not typically associated with speedy GPU performance, particularly in the mobile space. Many readers commented on the poor performance of Intel's HD Graphics in the Stream 7 review. However, one of the ways Intel's Moorefield chips are differentiated from some other chips in the Atom line is that they use PowerVR graphics. In the case of the Venue 8, it uses the PowerVR G6430 which was used previously in Apple's A7 chip.

There has historically been a noticable gap in performance between a given PowerVR chip implemented in an iOS device, and the same GPU in an Android device. Due to drivers and other software factors, the performance of the Android device is typically slower. Because of this, I've marked the iPhone 5s on all the charts except for the onscreen ones so comparisons can be drawn between the performance of the G6430 GPU on different operating systems. In the 3DMark graphics test, the Venue 8 actually scores higher than the iPhone 5s, and in the GFXBench tests there is not a large difference between the two devices. In Basemark X there is a sizable performance difference between the two devices in favor of the iPhone, but overall I don't think anyone should be concerned about massive differences in GPU performance between the G6430 running on iOS and it running on Android.

When evaluating the Venue 8's GPU performance on its own, it can hardly be said that it's slow. However, it's now competing with Apple's 8 core Rogue GPU in A8X, and NVIDIA's Kepler graphics in Tegra K1. The devices with those GPUs end up performing between two and three times faster than the Venue 8 in many cases, and with Tegra K1 that GPU power is available in NVIDIA's Shield Tablet which undercuts the Venue 8 at only $299. GPU performance has simply moved onward from when G6430 was leading the pack, and although the Venue 8 isn't exactly slow, it's outgunned by other devices that meet and even beat its price.

NAND Performance

The performance of a device's internal storage has never been a large point of focus in the past. Mobile device manufacturers don't advertise anything about their storage beyond the capacity. However, the speed of a device's NAND can have a significant impact on performance. Slow memory can be what bottlenecks a system's performance when any sort of heavy reading or writing is occurring in the background, which occurs more often than one would think due to background applications and tasks like automatically downloading and installing app updates.

In all of our tests, the Venue 8 is decidedly average. There's no situation where it shines at the top, but also no cases where it's significantly worse than the competition. I wouldn't expect the Venue 8's storage speeds to cause any performance issues for users, though it would be nice to see at 32GB NAND option at this price.

Display

The display is one of the most important aspects of a mobile device. This is even more true for tablets than smartphones, with tablets essentially being giant displays that you hold and interact with. Given that Dell has not had a massive presence in the mobile space in recent years, I had no idea what to expect from the display on the Venue 8. It's an 8.4" 2560x1600 AMOLED display, and with its thin bezels it shares the same Infinity Display branding as Dell's XPS 13. The display on the QHD+ XPS 13 has very good calibration, and so one would hope that this would apply to the Venue 8 as well.

Our first test is the maximum brightness of the device. As you can see, at 100% average picture level it's not looking good, with the Venue 8 having the absolute lowest brightness of any device we've tested in recent years. Indeed, when using the device in any environment with unforgiving lighting it could be difficult to see the display. What's also unfortunate is that the Venue 8 doesn't have any sort of brightness boost when auto brightness is enabled like on the Galaxy Note 4 and Moto X 2014.

One new chart that I'm introducing for AMOLED devices is a graph of the device's brightness at a given average picture level (APL), which is the percentage of the display that is lit compared to a 100% white display. Because AMOLED displays are able to turn pixels off, they are able to drive a higher brightness with a lower APL while staying within their target power usage. As you can see, the brightness of the Venue 8 will go as high as 430 nits when only 10% of the display is lit. Based on our previous testing, it can be said the APL for your average web page or app is somewhere around 80%, and so the brightness of the Venue 8 can be closer to 250 nits in normal use. Even so, 250 nits is quite dim when compared to other phones and tablets we've tested, and it's unfortunate to see all the recent AMOLED devices not made by Samsung hovering around that number.

The greyscale results on the Venue 8 are certainly not the worst of all the devices that we've tested, but with an average DeltaE of nearly five the errors are clearly visible for most shades of grey. When looking at the RGB balance for each shade we see that there's a fairly consistent lack of blue in the luminance which causes a noticable red shift in the device's whites and a resulting white point of 6203K.

In our saturation test, the Venue 8 performs exceptionally poorly, and comes in with the highest DeltaE of any device that we've tested in recent times. There's a large amount of saturation compression, with certain primary colors like green outputting what should be 100% saturated green with an input of only 60% saturation. In fact, some of the shades of red and green are more saturated than any color I have ever seen on a display before. While this could be a good thing on future devices with color management and Rec. 2020 content, at the moment it simply makes content designed for the sRGB gamut look wildly inaccurate.

With the large errors in greyscale and saturations, there's not much hope for accurate reproduction of color mixtures. With the color checker test we see an average error that is once again larger than any other device recently tested. What's even more frustrating is that the largest errors are in mixtures of green and red, which includes skin tones. Obvious errors in skin colors are visible in photos and when watching both animated and live action video on the Venue 8. While it's definitely not unusable, I would recommend pretty much any other device if looking at photos and watching videos is something a user wants to use a tablet for more than occasionally.

It's unfortunate that such a high end device is hampered by a relatively poor display. Every recent AMOLED device that isn't produced by Samsung has suffered from the same lack of calibration and low brightness, and on every single one of them it has a very negative impact on the user experience. In addition, the Venue 8 suffers from the color banding in darker shades of grey and green that exists on some AMOLED displays, and the PenTile subpixel pattern can be visible on the edges of smaller text even at a normal viewing distance. AMOLED displays have many benefits, but if manufacturers are unable to source calibrated panels of the same quality as those in Samsung's phones and tablets then they should seriously consider opting for a good IPS LCD display instead.

Battery Life

Battery life is obviously one of the most important aspects of a mobile device. With flagship tablets, users have come to expect that their device will give them ten hours or more of usage on a single charge. The Venue 8 comes with a 5,900 mAh (21Wh) battery, and Dell rates it for ten hours of usage.

In our WiFi web test, the Venue 8 manages just over nine and a half hours, which is fairly close to Dell's recommendation and competitive with the battery life results from the iPad Air 2. The Nexus 9 does hold a lead of a little over one hour, but in general any modern tablet that isn't the Stream 7 or a similar tablet is going to last you through the day adequately.

In our video playback battery test the Venue 8 really shines. The lower APL of films compared to black text on white webpages allows for a battery life of 12.77 hours which beats out both the iPad Air 2 and the Nexus 9, with a significant lead over the latter.

In BaseMark OS II we see that the Venue 8 does very well in both the overall time running as well as in the score given by BaseMark. Even with the CPU sustaining a high level of performance throughout the test, battery life is ahead of every other competing tablet.

In GFXBench we see a similar situation to BaseMark, but this time with the focus on the GPU. The Venue 8 takes the top spot in battery life, but comes out slightly below the middle of the results for its FPS in the final run of the test. Its FPS drops from 20.26FPS to 18.83FPS which means that there isn't much throttling going on with the GPU, but it also isn't putting nearly as much GPU power into a tablet as Apple, NVIDIA, and HTC are in their offerings.

Charge Time

Charge time is the other half of the battery life story. If you can charge a device very quickly, having a slightly shorter battery life may not be much of an issue. Conversely, an extremely long charge time can leave a device tethered to a wall for long periods even if it had great battery life while it was still charged. The Venue 8 comes with a 5V 2A charging block in the box, and it fortunately does not have any coil whine issues like I've experienced with other recent devices with high wattage chargers.

The Venue 8 does well in our charge time test. At 2.78hrs to reach 100%, it charges even quicker than many smartphones. There's not much else to be said beyond that Dell has gotten the best of both worlds with great battery life and a short time to recharge that battery once it's depleted.

Software

It could be said that software has always been something of a pain point for Android tablets. However, before discussing the application situation which is out of Dell's control, it's worth talking about the software that comes on the Venue 8 itself. The first thing users will notice is that despite being a flagship device launching after the release of Android Lollipop, the Venue 8 still runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat. Dell has promised that there will be a future update to Lollipop, but no concrete time frame was given and so users could be waiting for quite some time.

Unfortunately, there are some parts of the KitKat interface that look quite dated. The Tron blue on sliders, window borders, and buttons had run its course long before it was replaced in Lollipop, and seeing it re-appear after using Lollipop for quite some time is jarring. Other areas like the keyboard also look dated and don't fit in well with any applications that have been updated to align with Google's Material Design principles. Thankfully, applications like the keyboard that have been moved over to Google Play can be updated and switched to their new Material Design interfaces. Unfortunately, functional issues aren't as easily addressed in this manner. An example is how the notification shade and quick toggles are segmented into separate areas, which feels downright archaic after using Lollipop.

Dell has not made a great number of modifications to Google's Android KitKat interface. The launcher and settings applications have been given a turquoise texture for their background which I actually consider to be more aesthetically pleasing than the old Tron blue gradient in the case of the settings application. If users are unhappy with Dell's changes, they'll be in a similar situation to the keyboard where they can simply download the Google Now Launcher from Google Play and have the same interface as any users who are running Lollipop.

The decoupling of many applications from Android has done a great deal to reduce issues with interface and feature fragmentation introduced by not having the latest OS updates. Unfortunately, core applications like Settings and sections of the interface like the status bar and notification shade are always reminders that your device is running an outdated version of Android, and so I hope Dell is able to ship a Lollipop update sooner rather than later.

As for preinstalled applications, there are a number of them, including several Dell branded applications like Dell Cast and My Dell. None of these apps can be uninstalled, and it's especially concerning because after the space taken up by the OS, storage formatting, and preinstalled applications, there's only 9.12GB free for the user to use. While this can be expanded via MicroSD, it's not a solution for installing apps, and installing just a few large AAA games will fill the Venue 8 up quickly. Of the preinstalled applications, I recommend immediately disabling McAfee Security and MaxxAudio.

In addition to these preinstalled apps, the initial setup for the Venue 8 presents you with the screen shown above. I'm completely okay with the idea of offering potentially useful applications to be optionally installed during the setup process, and I think every single preinstalled application that comes on top of the stock Android apps should be offered in the same manner, unless it's necessary to use a certain hardware feature.

The Application Situation

One of the primary criticisms of Android tablets over the years has always been that the library of applications that are actually optimized for large screen devices is small, with the number of iPad applications usually taken as the reference point. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this, and it's worth mentioning them before looking at the tablet application situation currently on Android.

One of the reasons that developers may feel less compelled to make applications with special tablet interfaces on Android is actually due to the fact that Android has application scaling in the first place. Unlike on the iPad where applications made only for the iPhone look pixelated and display in a window, applications on Android will scale to fill an entire tablet display. The fact that phone applications aren't essentially unusable on Android tablets can definitely be a factor in developers preferring to focus on adding new features and fixing bugs rather than creating a specialized interface.

Another issue that seems to seldom be discussed is the aspect ratio and orientation of Android tablets. Generally, Android tablets have used a 16:10 aspect ratio, and their native orientation has been portrait for 7 to 8 inch tablets, and landscape for larger ones. While the 16:10 aspect ratio is better for watching videos than the 4:3 aspect ratio used on a select few tablets, its advantages don't go far beyond that. It's more difficult to fit dual-pane interfaces onto the screen in portrait mode, and there's a lack of vertical space to work with in landscape mode. The more narrow screen profile makes it difficult to build a common interface for tablets that expands when put into landscape without having to change significantly from the portrait interface. It's no surprise that Google has moved to 4:3 with the Nexus 9, but by this point most applications simply use their phone interface which will have proportions that scale fairly well to 16:10 in portrait.

The third issue, and the one that I find to be the most significant and shocking is Google's own leadership in this space. During my time with the Venue 8, I actually found that the most poorly designed applications were ones made by Google. While I could find some third party applications like Flipboard and Skype that at least attempt to have good tablet interfaces, every Google application except for Gmail did not even attempt to present a suitable tablet interface.

Above you can see the Google Play application on the Venue 8 compared to its appearance on the Nexus 6. While the user with the Venue 8 has to carry around a significantly larger device, they're not getting much use out of it with regards to the amount of information they see on screen. This almost comically large interface exists throughout the Google Play application, as well as many of Google's other apps.

The Hangouts app is a good example of both the issues with the 16:10 aspect ratio in making tablet applications, as well a somewhat shocking lack of focus on Android tablet apps from Google. As you can see above, the Hangouts application on Android tablets is essentially an enlarged version of the phone application, with more conversations visible due to the size of the display.

The iOS application is completely different from its phone counterpart, with a segmented layout that allows the list of conversations to be seen alongside an open conversation. This is a common interface for messaging application on iPad, and it would be quite cramped if attempted on a 16:10 device in portrait mode. However, in landscape mode both tablets should be capable of displaying a segmented view, yet Google has done no such thing with the Android app and simply has it stretch out horizontally. It's honestly an embarrassing situation for what should be the prime examples for developers of how to do tablet apps correctly on Android.

However, as I said earlier, there are notable examples of popular apps that have embraced the ability of Android tablets to display much more information than smartphones. Flipboard is a good example. It shows more tiles than its smartphone counterpart in portrait, and has a special interface for landscape that doesn't even exist in the smartphone layout. While it doesn't show quite as much text on the tiles as the iPad app due to the limited number of vertical pixels when using a 16:10 display in landscape, it's still a great tablet application on Android and something I would point to as an example for other developers to look at.

The issues with tablet applications is not something that Dell or any other tablet vendor can control, but it's something that needs to be discussed so users are aware of what they're getting into. I honestly can't lay any of the blame with third party developers on Android either, because they've been put in a difficult position by the more narrow 16:10 aspect ratio of these devices, and have had absolutely no leadership from Google on how to make great apps. If Google can't be bothered to do it, I don't see how other developers can be expected to. My fear is that even with Google making improvements to apps like Gmail, that it may be far too late to get proper support from developers at this point.

Camera

While the act of taking photos or shooting video with a tablet is seen as ridiculous by many, there are a number of people who use a tablet as their primary camera. I know of several people who, due to aging eyesight, love how the iPad acts as the biggest ever camera viewfinder. Tablet cameras can also be essential for the functionality of certain applications like Coach's Eye. Because of these and other reasons, it's important to put a reasonably good quality camera on a tablet.

Camera Specifications
	Dell Venue 8 7840
Front Camera	2.4MP (1920x1080 effective)
Front Camera - Sensor	IMX132 (1.12 µm, 1/6.95")
Front Camera - Focal Length	3.69mm
Front Camera - Max Aperture	F/2.2
Rear Camera	8.0MP (3264x2448)
Rear Camera - Sensor	OV8858 (1.12 µm, 1/4")
Rear Camera - Focal Length	2.94mm
Rear Camera - Max Aperture	F/2.4

At first glance, Dell's camera application appears to be fairly basic. The large camera button on the right takes the photos, the arrow next to it opens the menu to switch between the different camera modes, and the buttons below those are for the timer, front camera, and scene preset respectively. Once a user taps on the gear button on the left side, they're presented with several more options that give much finer control over the camera. There are controls for exposure bracketing, ISO, white balance, and a few other settings. One of the most important to change is the picture size setting, which for some reason is set to a 16:9 crop by default, despite the fact that the OV8858 is a 4:3 sensor.

Unfortunately, the camera results from the Venue 8 are less than stellar, even with extremely generous lighting that could rarely be achieved in the real world. When driving the sensor at base ISO there's still significant noise in the image, and the entire scene appears washed out. It almost looks like some sort of desaturation filter was applied overtop of the image. I was honestly surprised by how far the camera quality lags behind the iPad Air 2 that has the same sensor size and resolution.

The Venue 8 does use a narrower F2.4 aperture than the iPad at F2.2, but the issues in images aren't a result of the sensor being unable to capture enough light. Obviously the quality of a camera can't be determined just based on its resolution and sensor size, but such a large difference is also hard to imagine when those specifications are the same on two different devices. Mobile image signal processors are still black boxes, and so it's really impossible to say whether the Venue 8's disappointing results have more to due with the image processing or the sensor itself.

The other side of the Venue 8's camera experience is Intel's RealSense technology. In addition to the 8MP rear camera, there are also two "720p" cameras that are separated by 8cm and capture images to determine depth information about the objects in the scene being photographed. I wasn't able to get any information about the exact sensors used for the depth capture, and I suspect they're hidden behind the OV680 ISP that the Venue 8 uses.

Dell and Intel state that objects should be between three and thirty feet from the cameras for accurate depth information to be recorded. This allows for some neat post-processing tricks like adjusting focus, depth of field, and adding filters only to the background or foreground of a photo. These adjustments are all made within Dell's built in gallery application.

Above you can see an example of the ability to measure the distance between two points. In my experience the distances measured could be accurate, but there could also be very odd anomalies. My actual measurement of the distance between those two buildings was a little over 28 feet, and so while the top line gave an accurate measurement, the bottom one was completely wrong.

The ability to adjust focus and depth of field is similar to what HTC can do on the One (M8). Unfortunately, I could never get it to work really well. The above examples are the best I was able to do, and you can see that there's significant artifacting around the edges of the signs. In many other photos, the metal post would be blurred along with the background.

What's also frustrating is that the RealSense depth cameras are 16:9 sensors, and the main camera needs to be cropped to have the same aspect ratio for the technology to work. This means that RealSense photos are a lower resolution than normal images, and use a very long and narrow aspect ratio that cameras have typically avoided for that very reason. I don't see any technical reason for why the depth sensors couldn't have the same 4:3 aspect ratio as the main camera.

The last feature that RealSense enables is one that builds on top of the ability to adjust focus. Essentially, you can apply certain filters to areas that are in focus or out of focus. This allows for images like the one above to be created, where the object of focus is excluded from a filter or is the only object that a filter is applied to. In the above example, you can see that the red stop sign and blue street signs are in color, while the background objects have a black and white filter applied to them. It's difficult to pull this off perfectly, as it relies on the accuracy of the depth information of the photo, but it's still a neat effect that can be done much quicker than it would be possible to do in Photoshop.

Overall, I think the RealSense portion of the Venue 8 has potential, but it does need some tuning. It's let down by the generally poor quality of the rear camera, and I hope I can revisit RealSense again on a device with a bit more focus on camera quality along with depth cameras that have the same aspect ratio as the main camera. There's also room for adjustments to the algorithms used in future updates, and so these results may get better as time goes on.

WiFi

The Venue 8 has an LTE variant, but most tablets operate purely over WiFi. Since content consumption is a huge part of how tablets are used, it's important to have good WiFi performance. The Venue 8 uses the 802.11ac version of the Intel 7260 WiFi + BT 4.0 module in a single spatial stream configuration. This allows for a maximum WiFi speed of 433Mbps, although real world results will be lower due to various technological and environmental factors.

The Venue 8 does well in our WiFi test, although its performance isn't at the same level as some competing devices with 2x2 802.11ac implementations like the Galaxy Note 4 and Nexus 9. For a 1x1 802.11ac implementation its score is exactly where you'd expect it to be. During testing, I encountered a strange bug where the device would always revert to only operating on the 2.4GHz band, which limited the maximum WiFi speed to 72Mbps. Thankfully, a reset of the device fixed the issue and it hasn't resurfaced since.

Misc

We don't yet have any in-depth audio tests, but there were no apparent issues with the audio quality of the Venue 8 which uses Cirrus Logic's WM8958 audio codec. There are also two of NXP's TFA9890 amplifiers present to drive the stereo speakers. Other hardware components include NXP's PN544 NFC controller, and the previously mentioned Omnivision OV680 image signal processor.

Final Words

The Dell Venue 8 is a tablet that I really wanted to like. From the moment I unboxed it, it had a level of craftsmanship that I have seldom seen in other Android tablets. The aluminum casing is rigid and sturdy, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the flex that many plastic tablets exhibit. It's extremely thin, and it manages to be lightweight without going overboard and feeling like an empty demo unit. Although the design of the bezels gives it a somewhat unbalanced appearance, the Venue 8 is still a very well designed tablet.

It's clear that Dell has aspirations of becoming a serious competitor in the high end tablet space. Although the Venue 8 gets high marks for its design, a tablet can't survive on that alone. It needs to hold its own against the competition in every area, from the design, to the display, to the SoC. When you intend to sell a device for $399, there's very little room to compromise on any aspects without falling short of the competition.

Going over the Venue 8's strengths beyond its design, we find that it does quite well in our CPU tests. The Intel Atom Z3580 manages to hold its own against the competition's high end ARM SoCs, and at this point the list of applications that don't run on Intel devices consists of only a tiny handful of Android NDK apps. Its speed also doesn't come at the cost of battery life, with the Venue 8 trading blows with the competition in our battery tests.

Unfortunately, the Venue 8 isn't able to stand up to the competition in several other aspects. At $399, the Venue 8 is going right up against the Nexus 9, and there are just too many areas where it falls short. The most significant in my view is the display. The color accuracy is honestly unacceptable for a $399 device, and a 2560x1600 PenTile RGBG display has more subpixel pattern visibility than an 8.9" 2048x1536 RGB display. The GPU performance of the Venue 8 also leaves much to be desired compared to Tegra K1-64. It's not bad, but the competition is just a lot better.

There's also the issue of software. Not applications, but Android itself. The Venue 8 ships with KitKat, and there's no solid information on when it will be upgraded to Lollipop. Beyond that point, buyers just have to hope that Dell continues to provide updates, while with the Nexus 9 they're guaranteed them from Google for a fairly long period of time. Venue 8 users also have to deal with the OS and preinstalled software eating up 7GB of their 16GB device, and while microSD cards can expand media storage, they can't expand application storage.

While I could go on and on and compare every aspect of the Venue 8 to other tablets, I think the data speaks for itself. The build quality is much better than that of the Nexus 9, there's no question about that. However, in every other aspect it either matches the Nexus 9, or ranges from not quite as good to significantly inferior. With that in mind, it's hard to give a recommendation for the Venue 8 given its price. I strongly value good design and build quality, and the Venue 8 holds that over the Nexus 9. Unfortunately, that advantage isn't enough to outweigh all of the disadvantages. The Venue 8 just isn't enough to become my recommended Android tablet for $399. It's clear that Dell has put a lot of effort into creating the Venue 8, but they still have a ways to go.