The Dell Venue 8 7000 Series Review
by Brandon Chester on March 12, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Dell
- Android
- Mobile
- Venue 8 7000
Battery Life
Battery life is obviously one of the most important aspects of a mobile device. With flagship tablets, users have come to expect that their device will give them ten hours or more of usage on a single charge. The Venue 8 comes with a 5,900 mAh (21Wh) battery, and Dell rates it for ten hours of usage.
In our WiFi web test, the Venue 8 manages just over nine and a half hours, which is fairly close to Dell's recommendation and competitive with the battery life results from the iPad Air 2. The Nexus 9 does hold a lead of a little over one hour, but in general any modern tablet that isn't the Stream 7 or a similar tablet is going to last you through the day adequately.
In our video playback battery test the Venue 8 really shines. The lower APL of films compared to black text on white webpages allows for a battery life of 12.77 hours which beats out both the iPad Air 2 and the Nexus 9, with a significant lead over the latter.
In BaseMark OS II we see that the Venue 8 does very well in both the overall time running as well as in the score given by BaseMark. Even with the CPU sustaining a high level of performance throughout the test, battery life is ahead of every other competing tablet.
In GFXBench we see a similar situation to BaseMark, but this time with the focus on the GPU. The Venue 8 takes the top spot in battery life, but comes out slightly below the middle of the results for its FPS in the final run of the test. Its FPS drops from 20.26FPS to 18.83FPS which means that there isn't much throttling going on with the GPU, but it also isn't putting nearly as much GPU power into a tablet as Apple, NVIDIA, and HTC are in their offerings.
Charge Time
Charge time is the other half of the battery life story. If you can charge a device very quickly, having a slightly shorter battery life may not be much of an issue. Conversely, an extremely long charge time can leave a device tethered to a wall for long periods even if it had great battery life while it was still charged. The Venue 8 comes with a 5V 2A charging block in the box, and it fortunately does not have any coil whine issues like I've experienced with other recent devices with high wattage chargers.
The Venue 8 does well in our charge time test. At 2.78hrs to reach 100%, it charges even quicker than many smartphones. There's not much else to be said beyond that Dell has gotten the best of both worlds with great battery life and a short time to recharge that battery once it's depleted.
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Drumsticks - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Indeed. I haven't noticed a slowdown on any of my devices, including a surface Pro 1 and a 4570k based PC.Sushisamurai - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
Ditto, IPad Air 2, iPad retina mini, ivy-bridge i7-U, my mother of a desktop, iPhone 4S and even my Nokia 830 run this fine. :(Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
If you could please email me some screenshots of the ads in question, I will have it looked it.http://www.anandtech.com/Author/85
damianrobertjones - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Read the specs, all sounded good, until I reached "Android 4.4.4 KitKat".Oh well.
Michael Bay - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
You should have stopped at Android.Michael Bay - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Android?Jesus, what a way to kill a perfectly fine hardware mix.
Azurael - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
They make a Venue 8 Pro if you want to run Windows/Linux... Pretty dull looking, but at least it doesn't have stupid bezels.Azurael - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
If anybody wants a point of comparison with a Haswell-Y tablet, my i3 4020Y-based Dell Venue 11 scores the following running an Android-x86 5.0.2 build from a few days back (it's an x86_64 kernel w/ 32-bit userspace):Kraken 1.1 - 2741.8ms
Octane 2.0: 10668
WebXPRT kills Chrome for some reason (as does one of Vellamo's benchmarks) - I'm assuming that's something to do with the MESA/i915/Android interaction that Android-x86 creates. It worked under 4.4 and 5.0 is unofficial and buggy ATM.
BaseMark OS 2 hates this thing:
Overall: 1361
System: 1893
Memory: 1486
Graphics: 1572
Web: 776
And I know AT don't use it, and it's not exactly known for accuracy and consistency but AnTuTu 5.6.1: 50757
There's a lot of optimisation to be done, and it'd be nice to get 64-bit userspace working... But if Intel's slowest Haswell dual core can do that, think what the higher spec devices could do!
Kidster3001 - Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - link
Basemark OS2 for Android scores incredibly poor on all x86 devices. I don't recommend it as a benchmark for Android.darkich - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
"With generational improvements to their processors, it's not hard to imagine Intel becoming a major performance leader in the mobile space"In your dreams?
How in Earth will Intel even come remotely close to achieving that in the light of Tegra X1, Exynos 7420, and upcoming army of Cortex A72 based chips?!?
Wow, their newest Atom- built on a superior process to any of the compared chips, some of which being more than a half year old - held its
ground in CPU, and got owned in GPU tests.
I'm amazed at how your Intel has can translate that into some kind of promising prospect for Intel.
Wake up and see that in reality, Intel IS FAR BEHIND, and has nothing to counter the upcoming ARM chips.
The next Atom is basically a die shrink of Silvermont, and should be absolutely demolished by 14-20nm chips with Cortex A72 and Kryo CPU cores.