Dell Venue Pro: Lightning Strikes
by Vivek Gowri on March 14, 2011 3:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Dell
- Windows Phone 7
- Smartphones
- Venue Pro
- Mobile
Dell Venue Pro - Camera and Video
The Venue Pro has a 5MP camera with an LED flash, similar to many other smartphones on the market. And like so many of its competitors, it’s a pretty decent camera, so long as you have a lot of natural light. Switch to artificial can lighting or night time photography, and your pictures are suddenly an unusable grainy mess.
Daytime shot of an Audi R8
The same R8, this time at night.
Dell shouldn’t take it personally, it’s basically par for the course as far as smartphones go. Unfortunately, next to some of the rest of the WP7 crowd, it’s a bit lacking as far as editing options. You get to change ISO settings, white balance, and four scene modes. That’s about it, which absolutely pales in comparsion to the Samsung Focus’ long list of setting options.
Gallery: Dell Venue Pro Camera Samples
It’s overall not a huge deal though - usually with smartphone cameras, you don’t have too much time to mess with settings anyways. What is a huge deal is the camera button and the lack of a software shutter release. Like the lock button at the top of the device, the camera button is slightly recessed and an absolute pain to press. When you do press it, you invariably end up putting enough of a downward force on the device to unbalance it and give the phone a little shake as it takes a picture. That’s a great recipe for motion blur! I swear, a full two thirds of my pictures ended up resembling photos taken by the elusive Mr. Blurrycam. I started taking batches of 5 or 6 of the same shot to maximize my chances of getting one decent picture, and invariably ended up with no clear, usable images from the entire set. Example, this one of my living room. It's a bit blurry, but that's amazingly the clearest one of the lot. Maybe I just suck at taking pictures on this phone.
A very easy way to eliminate this effect is to just toss a software shutter release button in the camera app, similar to how many Android phones have camera buttons in the hardware and software. It makes sense, but I won’t hold my breath for it - the WP7 requirements list a hardware camera button for a reason. But if you have a steady hand, the Venue Pro is easily capable of web-quality photos, which is about all you can ask from a smartphone camera.
The video camera is decent, good enough for web quality video, but nothing earth shattering. The first-gen Snapdragon processors are limited to capturing either 640x480 at 30fps or 720p at 24fps. No problems with the microphone here, so no repeat of Brian’s issues with the Surround.
Update: Here's the video sample. YouTube compression was basically killing it, so I switched to Vimeo.
AnandTech - Dell Venue Pro Video Sample 2 from Vivek Gowri on Vimeo.
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VivekGowri - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Yeah, sorry about that. I had to rush the pics, so they got taken in non-ideal lighting conditions and such. They'll be improved next time around though.strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
At least the R8 V10 is a much more interesting subject than the usual smiley mugVivekGowri - Sunday, March 20, 2011 - link
I live right next to an Audi dealership, so my camera samples usually end up being of new Audis. Last time I think it was a 2011 A8, before that a TT or something. I try to keep it interesting :)earle36 - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
When this phone came out, it was THE phone I wanted to get. Love the form factor, love WP7. I went to the Microsoft store and played with it a bunch, and decided this was the phone I was going to get. Then, I started hearing about issues with the device. Camera issues (mentioned in the review), device crashes, blue tooth issues, wifi issues, engineering battery sample shipping with the device, SIM card failing, replacement devices completely failing, and so on. In fact there was a thread detailing the issues on the dell support site:http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/mobile...
Some of the points are very picky, and the list has grown quite a bit over time, but there were really some serious issues. Dell has been incredibly slow to respond, but they did respond. What remains on that issues list is mostly "nice to haves", but I thought it was worth mentioning.... Also, a lot of people had terrible luck with the customer support...vague responses about timelines for replacements, fixes for the issues, and so on.
Thought it was worth mentioning.
BaronMatrix - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Have no fear. I have ZERO problems. I use the 4G and not WiFi but call quality is great with the included headphones and email is VERY FAST. I needed to get my personal email off of work PCs and this does the job PERFECTLY.The KB lets me type long emails easily with ZERO errors.
Wizzdo - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
"I have ZERO problems"Can you explain in more depth the issues you are having with ZERO?
BaronMatrix - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
It keeps looking like an O.Faruk88 - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Would have been nice to see a section on the phone's reception capabilities, like in other recent phone reviews on anandtech!TareX - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
An AMOLED screen that dim would be virtually unusable outdoors.bplewis24 - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
While I still can't stand the UI look and could never purchase a WP7 phone on that basis alone, I love the hardware look of this phone.Brandon