At present, although the growth rate of iPad sales has slowed down, it is still the largest part of the tablet market. If the Android tablet that lost the system wants to seize the opportunity, it must have its own characteristics and have excellent hardware. The flagship design and ultra-thin Venue 8 7000 have proved its strength with the CES award, but can the award really bring success?

Specifications:

8.4 inch, 2560 × 1600 OLED screen;

Intel ATOM Z3580 processor (4 cores 2.3GHz), PowerVR G6430 GPU, 2GB RAM, 16GB expandable memory;

Rear main camera 8 megapixel+dual 720p Intel RealSense 3D camera;

Front 2 megapixel camera;

215.9 x 124.2 x 6.1 mm，305g；

The price is 3299 yuan.

appearance:

"Is this a Dell?"

This kind of questioning voice is still common when the Venue 8 is used to swagger around the market and make noise in front of friends. Dell, who is affectionately called "Silly Duodai" by Chinese netizens, may have had a bad reputation for some time in the past, but the ultra-thin (6mm) anodized aluminum body used by Venue 8 this time has at least reversed the old impression in terms of appearance.

But to be honest, if you want to praise an element of Venue 8, you should choose this screen. This 8.4-inch 2560 × 1600 OLED screen is slightly larger than the screen of the iPad Mini 3, providing a sense of clarity that I have never experienced on a tablet (361ppi, 326ppi for the iPad Mini 3). And this screen is not only very delicate, OLED panel brings deep black, gorgeous colors and super wide visual angle; Currently, there are not many tablets with OLED screens, mainly Samsung products. Other manufacturers may not choose OLED due to cost reasons. As for Dell's Venue 8, I am willing to applaud for their choice of OLED screens.

In addition, the design of this narrow frame is also very popular. The metal material on the back is wrapped, and then the distance between the screen and the wrapping on the front is shortened as much as possible. It is totally different from other tablet computers with very wide frames. Although the design of the narrow frame is somewhat impractical in practical use, when holding it upright, The thumb inevitably affects the normal viewing of the screen. Although the chin at the bottom is still wide enough, it is not comfortable to hold it in an upright posture, and it also blocks the front speakers.

The anodized aluminum alloy panel on the back provides an excellent feel. Dell claims that the Venue 8 is the thinnest tablet computer on the market, and the body is not as heavy as expected (305 grams, one seventh lighter than the iPad Mini). When holding it in the hand, you can feel the high-end fine workmanship, and can afford its price of 3299 yuan, But unfortunately, the designer didn't pay special attention when designing the position of the camera on the back. The camera was placed at the bottom of the fuselage. Two 720p 3D induction cameras were hidden at the left and right ends of the thin black strip in the aluminum alloy part. When using the camera, the tablet must be held upside down, or the fingers will block it.

Below the front of the fuselage is a huge speaker and a 2 megapixel front camera. In actual use, the probability of being blocked by the hand is quite high, especially when holding horizontally.

The design of other parts is not as wonderful as that of the camera. The left side is the common power button and volume button. The upper position may not be easy for many people to control, but at least it will not be accidentally touched during use. The lower part of the right side of the fuselage is the SD card slot that supports 512GB at most, and the bottom is the MICROUSB data interface.

Camera:

As one of the main selling points of Venue 8, the "real sense" camera composed of three cameras on the back is actually quite powerful. Its working principle is to collect multiple depth of field information, and then perform in machine synthesis. Of course, the premise is that the user needs to turn on the special "depth of field mode" of the camera when taking photos. At this time, the tablet will take multiple photos in succession. After the synthesis is completed, the focus can be adjusted, the background can be blurred, or the foreground can be blurred in the original image library APP.

In actual use, this mode needs to be manually enabled, so without the user's knowledge, some people may complain that it is ineffective. However, after getting used to it, they can still take a positive attitude towards this function. The biggest use is that when taking a picture that needs both a clear foreground and background, they can get a very good picture, As for the disadvantage, naturally, the processing time is too long, but at least Dell will throw the processing process to the background, so it will not affect continuous photography.

In addition to the special depth of field effect, these three cameras can also measure the size of objects, but to achieve the best effect, Dell said that you should stand 30 cm to 5 m away from the object being measured. But to be honest, this function feels that the composition of the gimmick is large. After all, ordinary users have a low probability of using this function in daily life, For those who are renovating the house, are you willing to trust the tape measure in your pocket or a tablet computer?

However, the imaging effect of this camera is quite good. The color rendering is satisfactory. Although it may not be bright enough, the picture details are also good. If you are willing to spend some time to manually adjust the options, the imaging effect will be better than that in automatic mode, and you can also use various special effects to shoot, But we still hope that its photographic effect can be more eye-catching.

Performance, endurance and software:

Intel Z3580 processor, with 2GB of memory, Venue 8 is basically on the same level as the performance of the current flagship tablet. There is no pressure to open multiple applications and switch back and forth, and the system is quite stable. The software crashes, suspended animation and stutters do not appear at all, which is very consistent with the performance of a flagship Android tablet.

In the actual score performance, Venue 8's web browsing score is excellent, its graphics performance is slightly inferior to Nexus 9, and it is on a par with products of the same positioning. To be honest, there are few specially optimized applications for Android tablets, so there is still room for improvement in the overall system experience. This is the status quo of Android tablets, and it is no wonder that Dell and Intel are.

Dell official data claims that the Venue 8 has a 10 hour battery life, comparable to other tablets using Intel processors. However, in actual testing, we found that Dell is actually modest, The video playback time of Venue 8 reached 12 hours and 11 minutes, much longer than we expected. It is almost the same as Samsung Tab S, which also uses OLED screen. The endurance performance is very satisfactory.

In terms of the whole system, Dell's route is very simple - to keep Android original, Venue 8 runs a clean Android 4.4 operating system. Dell just pre installed several APPs in the system, including Dropbox, EverNote, Flipboard, etc. It's a pity that Android 5.0 does not run natively. Fortunately, Dell's spokesman announced that in the near future (probably within a month), it will push Android 5.0 operating system updates for it.

Summary:

Selling an Android tablet at a high price of 3299 yuan definitely requires confidence. For a flagship product, it needs to have its own characteristics. The narrow frame design of Venue 8 and the thinnest body on the market (at least as advertised by the official) should meet this condition, plus excellent workmanship, excellent endurance and a screen with excellent effect, Venue 8 has successfully become one of the best Android tablets at present. Intel's realism technology and good photo effects should also add a lot to it, but users need to get used to the difficulty of holding caused by the narrow border and the strange back camera design.

Put aside those minor shortcomings, Venue 8 is really an impressive product, which can successfully get rid of the name of "Silly Duodai", and Dell's brand awareness may be able to compete with Samsung, Sony and even Apple. Although Venue 8 itself is not perfect, it has successfully made us interested in Dell's next product launch.

advantage:

Excellent workmanship and dazzling appearance;

Strong endurance;

Excellent screen effect;

Equipped with Intel live technology.

Disadvantages:

Speakers and rear camera are easily blocked;

The actual photo quality is not as good as expected.

Original text and pictures from