Dell Venue 8 7840

 

Introduction

 

Pros	Cons
Beautiful Screen at 2560×1600 resolution.	New features are useless and gimmicky
Excellent battery life	Awkward engineering gives awkward handling
Powerful processor allows for smooth performance	Camera quality is very poor

I would like to make a correction to the video the tablet is actually $399.99.

Dells new tablet is a mouthful, and that is a fact. Another fact is that this little 6mm mouthful is a powerful tablet. It sports a high-resolution OLED display at 8.4 inches and a resolution of 2560×1600. This display dons the “Infinity” name that Dell gave it.

We can’t argue with that.

Onto the powerful aspect of this tablet. It runs on Intel Atom processor, and is one of the first tablets to run an Atom. It also has some very interesting camera technology coming straight from Intel’s brains to our hands. The downside is that it only comes in 16GB on-board storage but the upside is it will take a micro-SD card up to 512GB (Yes, 1/2 a Terabyte). This tablet is the slimmest commercially available, but that isn’t the only thing that makes it stand out from the competition, read on to find out. The Dell Venue 8 7840 is available now for $399.99.

Ergonomics and Design

The 6.1mm body isn’t the only eye catcher. The machined aluminum back has three cameras that are all part of the new Intel® RealSense™ Snapshot Depth Camera & Dell Gallery. Its a sharp-edged tablet, with tiny borders around three of the edges and a thick bottom speaker that dons the 2MP front-facing camera. Yes the front facing camera is at the bottom, and that does in-fact make it difficult to video chat with other people since you have to either hold the tablet angled towards your face or flip it upside-down.

 

 

The slim frame is stunning, but it doesn’t beat the rivals. Its only half a millimeter slimmer than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and only 1mm slimmer than the current iPad Mini. Its a nice difference if you consider what had to be done to get there, but is it worth the price tag and does it actually make the difference in today’s power-driven tablet usage?

The Venue is less impressive when it comes to the weight. Coming at 305g its lighter than the iPad Mini 3 (311g), but the Google’s Nexus 7 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S 8.4 are both lighter than the Venue.

The next issue we ran into is the three cameras located on the back-side of the tablet. Our hands would block the camera and while the Intel® RealSense™ warned us of the obtrusive fingers/hands we still found it annoying to have to position our hands in very awkward places to take a quick shot.

The tablet also does not have its own flash so the images had to be taken in well-lit environments or with a back light for a clearer shot

While the tablet is the thinnest in the world, its definitely not the most ergonomic or comfortable to hold for long periods of time. Due to being sharp-edged it digs into your hand as you hold it, and if you try to move your hand to get a more suitable position you are bound to click on the screen accidentally.

The large bottom that houses the speaker is also a two-faced coin that has a benefit of being wide enough to hold but too long from the base of the display that you would have to use your other hand to reach for the screen during gaming.
Though the issue is very small and can be dealt with, its not the only one. The power and volume buttons while smooth and very responsive can be obtrusive in landscape mode.
During our testing and using of the tablet we didn’t find it to be too much of an issue, but when you get to play with it for more than 3 hours a day, you might find that its not as comfortable as you’d like it to be.

Sound and Display

The Venue’s 8.4-inch panel has a powerful 359PPI, 2560×1600 resolution. These numbers rival the new Nexus 8, and Samsung Galaxy Tab S. The density numbers aren’t just simple numbers, they allow you to have even more real-estate than you would have if it had an HD 1080p display.

The AMOLED panel allows for very vivid and sharp blacks, and a perfect contrast. Films and images look stunning with fantastic colors and proper brightness.
The mighty little tablet pumps out a fantastic performance during gaming sessions and with the viewing angles to be excellent and having a decent brightness for outside and indoors.
Though its not the perfect display, the problems are few and minor. The glossy screen which is presented in most tablets and rivals and the minor yellow tint added to the whites.

 

The stereo speakers allow for a wonderful viewing experience for those of us on the go needing to watch the next season of Game of Thrones on the ride to work. With the top-end that is clear and well balanced, and a bass that has a decent thump to it without snapping or crunching like you would expect a poor speaker to.

The only problem I have encountered and others have reported is the poor positioning of the speakers in landscape mode makes it so that the entirety of your sound comes out of one side (depending on your orientation might be left/right.) This also leads to the tablets software flaw that makes it so the left and right while in portrait mode are in their proper places, but when you tilt the tablet into portrait the orientation goes into top being the right and bottom being left, which at first was a little hard to get used to but with time we made it work.

Battery

 

As you can see from the battery life tests we performed using AnTuTu Battery benchmark Venue 8 7840 is above some of the most used tablets in the market today. What does this mean to you? More hours of Netflix, more gaming days, more reading your favorite blogs and social media.

 

Camera

There’s two? No. Three? No. FOUR—that’s right: four cameras on the Venue 8 7840.  The front 2MP camera that is located in the bottom corner housed in the speaker bar. Then theres the 3 8MP camera-array in the back for the RealSense software inside. This software allows you to measure the area of objects in the picture that it takes, the distance between two objects, and the distance between two points on an object. The technology is still in its youth and is very finicky. By that I mean that its very inaccurate for precision purposes, but can be used in a situation where an estimate is needed, e.g. if car accident requires the insurance agency to see the amount of damage, the software can tell you the approximate size of the dent.

The quality of shots are problematic and average at best. With no flash you are required to take images in well-lit situations or with back light.

Example shots: (Click on them to see the examples)

Performance

Dell’s newest tablet is nothing to laugh about in the power aspect, and is supported by Intel’s quad-core Atom Z3580 processor. It’s the most powerful processor in Intels 22nm range, which in numbers means upwards of 2.33GHz
and a GPU that clocks out at 533MHz.

 

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, with its 8-core processor that has 4-cores at 1.9GHz and 4-cores at 1.3GHz, is the only tablet that can come close to the strength and raw power of the Venue 8 7840.

Though these are just numbers and in daily performance neither will really feel slow, as the tablet industry makes apps that can run on a toaster, so these beasts will tear every single game in the play store apart and ask for more. The rest of the specifics are rather basic and bland, with 2GB of RAM and 16GB on-board memory that come to only 10GB of vacant memory after the OS and the bloat-ware take their parts away. The microSD slot saves the day with its 3TB capability, and though we don’t have microSD cards in that size, the ability to use it makes a point. The accelerometer, GPS, dual-band 802.11ac wireless and Bluetooth 4.0 are all present.

With the 20251 score in Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark you can tell that Intel is no joke when it comes to power. Although the numbers are all theoretical and no benchmark is perfect, we can vouch that this tablet is in-fact as powerful as it the number make it sound, with the snappy-fast home-screen movement and menus that load instantly you will never think twice about performance. Only issue that ever arose is with the included software that is packaged into the tablet.

Software

*(The only software we installed was PCMark, CPU-Z, and AnTuTu Battery Life Test, which is not shown in the apps window.)

Dell loaded this tablet with its own fair share of bloat-ware. All of this is running under Android KitKat 4.4.2, which will be updated to Android Lollipop 5.0 in April, with some battery improvements, a smoother app-switching experience and better support for graphics. Some of the preloaded apps include office focused software, POLARIS Office 5, a business card-reader, Dell Cast app which is a more expensive Google Chromecast. MaxxAudio is also included to tweak the speakers. Dropbox also has a spot on this list as an app that was preloaded.

Conclusion

This is where it gets hard, because the price of $399 and the small issues that are presented will deter some of the elitist tablet users. The bloatware and the camera quality will deter most users as well. So the question stands: Are you looking for a small tablet with a fantastic screen? Are you looking for a tablet that will survive all day without the need to look for an outlet? Are you an avid Dell supporter and do not care for my opinion because you already made up your mind? Then this will satisfy your urges.

That said, this tablet does have drawbacks a few aforementioned few, and if you are a gamer, this will not beat the nVidia Shield, which is the same price and significantly faster. So all things considered, this is a great choice for most people that just want a great tablet with a reliable build and a sexy look for only $399.