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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darkich - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
"Intel will be somewhere below 5 by then."Oh I see, you're nothing but a TROLL
Michael Bay - Saturday, March 14, 2015 - link
So all you have is an eteranl looser`s excuse.Typical of ARM fanatics.
Michael Bay - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Oh please. Intel has to improve a much more complex architecture and simultaneously drive power consumption down, while ARM is touching the heat ceiling on current complexity. Those issues will only exacerbate in next iterations.GNUminex_l_cowsay - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Considering that there isn't much you can do with a tablet besides viewing content. How could something with such a bad screen possibly be useful?extide - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Wow, those CPU scores are terrible. Even nVidia can roll a custom ARM core and be faster, and I'm not even talking about the GPU part, only CPU. This is sad Intel, c'mon you're letting me down! ATOM NEEDS TO GO. Use Core-M and then for the cheaper segments Intel needs to roll a custom ARM-v8 core. It's time!djc208 - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Remember that in some cases the Atom CPU has to do a real-time conversion from ARM to X86 on any app that doesn't provide an X86 build. I notice that on my MeMo Pad some things just don't run, or don't run right even though they're fine on my phone. Admittedly the MeMo has far less RAM, but it's still glitchy on some apps. But it also means that some stuff just isn't as responsive because the CPU is trying to translate and run at the same time. Which admittedly is kind of what the Tegra K1 is doing too, just without the optimization library.extide - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
That only happens on apps that are native code, which is basically only things like full-screen 3d games. All of the main google apps, browsers, and common stuff you use is java, so it has no additional translation overhead compared to running on ARM.However, the truth is that it's the end result that matters.
tipoo - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Browsers aren't java, they're native.staiaoman - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
and THIS is why we patiently wait for anand's review before buying a tablet, instead of going off of the "FIRST!" articles from other sites. Well done, guys. Thorough as always.Refuge - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Haha agreed, they are my guiding light.