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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Sushisamurai - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
Hell, even CNET and sister sites quoted anandtech when the cheating was found/occurred. That's some pretty big influence there. What about the times when they got GPU architectures from imagination and the like (we still miss u anand), that was also to "OEM recommendations". I feel AT's done some good work in terms of pushing the consumer/review industryaz060693 - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Cirrus Logic DAC? I really want to see how good the audio output is.zodiacfml - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Dell, why bother? Why not compete with Asus's convertible laptops with this type of hardware.shadarlo - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Tablets that cost >$150-$200 should always come with usb-c, HDMI, or display port out. There are basically no exceptions to that, but it's even more true if it's a Windows tablet. Not having a 2nd USB port and a video out port on a windows tablet is beyond stupid.This being android and $400 is a hard sell to me. I just can't understand the purpose of a $400 android tablet unless it had phone functionality built into it. If it was a phone as well it'd be AWESOME.
FXi - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Too bad there isn't a Win 8.1 version. Might have actually sold a bunch thenWolfpup - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
Regarding that CPU...I thought that all second gen Atoms were going to be using Intel's GPUs from now on? I had no idea they had any running PowerVR still.I thought that sounded like a bad idea for driver support until I realized this was an Android tablet (thought it was Windows 8 at first) and lost interest.
BUT I'm still curious as to why there's a second gen Atom chip shipping with PowerVR instead of an Intel GPU.
All the ones I've seen until this are 4 core parts that are fairly slow clocked. Not exactly great considering a 20 or even 40 core part isn't a powerhouse, but at least it means they're driver compatible with Intel's other GPUs.
Wish that Nvidia had been able to license x86 and we had Tegra K1 tablets running Windows 8, complete with a GPU that would actually run modern games semi-decently. THAT would have been seriously cool (well, assuming the CPU part was fast enough LOL).
Razzy76 - Friday, March 20, 2015 - link
Android ruined this tablet.NamelessTed - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
If this tablet were running Windows it would be much more compelling to me. I got an nVidia Tegra Note tablet when they first launched and it has been a great product. The longer I use it the more I wish I had a slightly bigger screen and that I had the ability to use Windows. Within the next year I really really hope we see a sub-$400 Windows 10 tablet with front facing speakers and an 8-9" display.Angelina Mathews - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
Hello everyone !! I am really very excited to share my experience of using Dell Venue 8 Pro 3000 Series Tablet. Though it is shocking but also the fact that at starting when I purchased this tablet I was not confident about my decision since I was using tablet of this brand for the very first time but then later on after being a user of it I realize that this tablet is actually highly efficient. It being powered a host of Windows 8.1 business specific features and applications facilitates the users with an amazing working experience. To know more, click here - http://delltablet.laptab.in