Dell has just launched its newest Android tablet in Singapore recently. The Dell Venue 8 7000 has been available in the United States and other parts of the world for several weeks, and it has finally come to our sunny shores. It is a tablet in the Dell Venue family, which includes other tablets, including ones that run on Windows.
Form
The first thing that strikes me is how incredibly thin the screen bezels are on three sides. Dell has made an unconventional design on the tablet’s form-factor with the razor-thin bezels, leaving real estate only on one side of the 8.4 inch OLED screen for the front-facing 2 mega-pixel camera and stereo speakers. The screen resolution comes in at 2560 x 1600 pixels, about 359 pixel per inch, which means that the Venue 8 7000 has a higher screen density than the iPad Air 2.
At 6 mm on its side, the Venue 8 takes the thinnest tablet crown from the anorexic Apple iPad Air 2, beating it a smidgeon to be the sleekest tablet on the market now. The squared-off edge design, combined with its dark grey anodized aluminium body, gives it a professional purpose look that I personally fancy. It feels light in the hand and looks brilliant.
Intel RealSense
Not only does the Dell Venue 8 7000 launch bring a new tablet into the market, it also premiers the Intel RealSense technology for tablets. Intel RealSense “is an integrated 3D camera that delivers real-time depth sensing” and “senses the surrounding world to scan, interact, play games augment reality, and enhance photo and real-time video in three dimensions.” On the back of the Venue 8 7000, there is the main 8-Megapixel camera and two other tiny 720-pixel depth cameras, and the three cameras work in tandem to allow depth information to be collected together with a photo.
The Dell Camera and Gallery apps, combined with RealSense technology, allow some neat tricks with photos, such as changing the point of focus after a photo is taken. I do not have to worry about having a wrong point of focus when I snap a photo with the Venue 8 7000.
Another nifty trick the Venue 8 7000 can do is taking measurements within a photo. For example, if I want to know how tall a person is, I can take a photo of the person and draw a vertical line through him or her, and the app would be able to calculate the actual height! These are some tricks that this tablet is capable of; however, I think there could be cooler apps and games in the future which would exploit the depth information captured by RealSense cameras.
The Rest of the Specs
The Venue 8 7000 runs an almost stock version of Android 4.4.4 “KitKat”, although an update to the latest Android 5 “Lollipop” is expected to be on the way. Personally, I prefer using stock versions of Android to the interpretations of Android by other brands, as they tend to feel heavy or clunky with features that I do not use.
The Venue 8 7000 has 16 gigabytes of built-in storage that is expandable to 512 gigabytes with a MicroSD card slot, 2 gigabytes of RAM. The Venue 8 7000, running on Intel’s 64-bit Atom processor and its 5900 mAh battery, can last up to 9.8 hours browsing the web on WiFi. For connectivity, the Venue 8 comes with Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac for WiFi, with an option for mobile LTE.
Last Words
The Venue 8 7000’s sleek and unique form factor with its understated looks, combined with the RealSense technology make it stand out from the tablet choices available now, both in terms of capabilities and looks.
The Dell Venue 8 7000 is available for S$659 with the Venue Folio, and for S$699 with the Venue Keyboard Folio.
