Dell entered the Android tablet market late last year by releasing the Venue 8 7000, a device with an understated though appealing form that contains good specs and an interesting camera technology.
Dell recently launched a larger-screen variant, the Venue 10 7000. At a starting price of $499, it’s meant for the business user. This tablet has similar design cues as its smaller cousin: A silver-colored aluminum casing with right-angled edges, but unlike the Venue 8, it has a cylindrical grip running along one side which contains the battery. While this entices you to hold the Venue 10 with a single hand, my wrist quickly felt strained, and palm became cramped, because the overall weight of this tablet is over a pound.
For $130, Dell sells a Bluetooth keyboard that additionally serves as a protective cover. You’ll likely want to buy the tablet and keyboard together, since the cylindrical grip of the Venue 10 gets in the way of the designs of most third-party keyboards for tablets that also function as protective covers.
This keyboard sticks via powerful magnets, and the two pieces of hardware merge seamlessly, becoming a mini-notebook. Hinges allow you to swing the keyboard to cover over the tablet’s screen, and to prop up and angle the tablet — just like the way you’d open and close a notebook. The keyboard can also attach with the screen faced away from the keyboard, so that it can be used to display the tablet for presentation purposes.
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Typing on this keyboard was not conducive for me at my personal, fast rate: Sometimes the cursor would suddenly jump to another location as I was typing, even though my palms or thumbs did not come into contact with the touchpad. The individual keys respond well to presses, but their sizes may be a shy smaller than expected for most adult fingers. Reducing the spacing from one another in order to have the keys be larger would have been more preferable.
Display
Graphics, images and text certainly look razor-sharp on this tablet’s display, thanks to its high resolution of 2560-by-1600 pixels set within a 10.5-inch screen. The OLED is bright and lights evenly across it, without colors blurring into one another or everything washing out when the backlight is set at its maximum level.
The view angle range is very wide — there’s hardly a difference in lighting when you look at this display from an extreme off-angle. While outdoors in sunlight, I found it difficult to see things on it — though text set against a white background could be passable. The glare from the display’s glossy surface added to this problem.
Other issues: The display appears to be calibrated to emphasize warm colors — oranges and yellows — with blue as the strong complement. So graphics and photos have a saturated look that brings to mind the digitally filtered color scheme used in a modern-day action movie. I played some video files on the Venue 10 and found that low-lit areas of the footage appeared too dark on its display.
Cameras
Like the Venue 8, this tablet has three rear-facing cameras: one is the main (at 8 megapixels), while the other two (each are 2 megapixels) serve as auxiliaries. Each captures the same image within a range of focus different from the other two. (Images taken with the three rear cameras at once are captured at 2 megapixels.)
Using an included app, you can change the focus of various areas of the image after you’ve captured it. This app also has a tool that tries to measure what the real-world distance was between two areas in the photo. This technology, developed by Intel, worked and was pretty cool when I played around with it.
As for the quality of images and video taken with the rear trio of cameras, and the front 2-megapixel camera, lighting was very much a key factor. Stills and footage that I took outside on a sunny day looked sharp and bright. Indoors with average, normal lighting, things looked grainier and dimmer. Still images and video clips I took with just the main, 8-megapixel rear camera looked sharp and bright, whether I was indoors under normal lighting during daytime, or outside in the sunlight.
This main rear camera has impressive up-close focus: I got it to focus sharply on text within about two inches of it. So it can absolutely be used to capture images of paper documents with their text in focus.
Audio
Two speakers are embedded into the tablet’s cylindrical grip. They belt out sound that was sufficiently loud and mostly free of distortion when the volume was cranked up. With the Venue 10 propped up on its keyboard attachment to show business presentations, these speakers are powerful enough to deliver the audio portion while inside a typical conference room, without having to connect external speakers to the tablet.
The speakers seem designed to emphasize the midrange, and don’t sound capable of producing low, strong bass well. Presets can be selected from the Android home screen to enhance sound quality under specific uses (such as listening to music or watching video). Or, you can manually tweak audio levels through an included equalizer app.
Mics
The Venue 10 has three built-in mics. The audio of the video clips I recorded using the camera app sounded clear without distortion. When I recorded clips of myself with the front camera, however, the mic was more prone to pick up background sounds than my own voice. Maybe this has something to do with the mics all being positioned along the edges of this tablet — one on one side, two on another — and, therefore, they may not be optimally aimed at or away from the user.
Software
The Venue 10 runs Android 5.0.1, Lollipop, and this OS’ default interface remains unblemished, neither augmented nor overridden by Dell with another program. The tablet comes with the standard assortment of Google apps and a few that are specific to operating its hardware (i.e. its specialized cameras and sound). There are seven, pre-installed third-party apps, including Evernote and McAfee Security, none of which can be uninstalled.
Performance
Like the Venue 8, this tablet runs on an Intel Atom Z3580, a 64-bit, quad-core processor that clocks up to 2.33 GHz. The Venue 10 I tested performed reasonably well when I launched and purposely kept several apps open at once. I spent most of my time with the tablet using Chrome, on which I would open dozens of tabs, and the Venue 10 didn’t appear to lag as I jumped among them.
The back of the tablet’s aluminum casing in the area above the cylindrical grip became slightly warmer under the processing duress I put it. This is not to suggest that the Venue 10’s performance was flawless. I watched a few video files on it, which I had loaded onto it using a third-party app, VLC Media Player. Every several minutes, playback would stutter yet recover, resuming normally, regardless of how I adjusted this app’s settings. This could be an issue specifically with VLC, which, although a popular media player across the major OS platforms, may have kinks when used with an Android device that runs an Intel processor.
Battery
Dell lists the Venue 10 as being able to run up to 7 hours on a full charge. I put the tablet through the typical activities — browsing the Internet, capturing images and video with its cameras, listening to music, watching videos, etc. — and its battery lasted only a little over 5 hours. This figure is based on a calculated total: I would power the tablet down when I wasn’t using it, and would adjust the display’s brightness between its middle and highest levels. I should also point out that I used the Venue 10 most of the time with its keyboard attached, and this may have shortened the battery life.
Conclusion
When using it without its keyboard, the Venue 10 is a decent tablet, but I kept wondering if it is truly a worthy successor to the Venue 8. This predecessor is a slab but elegant in its simple design. The Venue 10’s form factor departs from this so that it can be used more effectively as a notebook.
So then, as a notebook, is the Venue 10 a contender for professional needs? In terms of price, the answer becomes iffy because, frankly, it runs up against several options in the market, most of which are Windows two-in-one devices, like the Surface 3. The new Microsoft tablet has similar specs; you can get it with its keyboard for the same total price as the Venue 10 and its keyboard together ($630). The question then becomes which OS platform you prefer or require.
Specs
OS: Android 5.0.2, Lollipop Processor: Intel Atom Z3580, 2.33GHz RAM: 2 GB Onboard storage: 16GB or 32GB eMMC
Display: 10.5” OLED, 2560 x 1600 pixels
Audio: headphone/microphone combo jack, mics (three), speakers (two) Cameras: 2 megapixels, front; 8 megapixels, rear; 2 megapixels, rear (two) Networking: Bluetooth 4.1, Wi-Fi (802.11ac) Ports: Micro USB 2.0 Expansion slots: microSD Battery: Up to 7 hours (listed); about 5 hours (as tested for this review)
Dimensions (width, length, thickness): 7.69” x 9.58” x 0.24”
Weight: 1.32 lbs
Price: $499 (16GB eMMC version)
