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 - Performance and Battery Life
Windows Phone 7 devices have set specifications, with the 1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250/8650 (for CDMA models) being the only SoC supported at present. The 8250 is part of the first generation of Snapdragon processors, built on a 65nm manufacturing process and with Qualcomm’s Adreno 200 GPU onboard. It’s a pretty old processor, so hopefully the next wave of devices will give us a better range of newer Snapdragon or Cortex A9-based processors to choose from (we’ve heard that driver issues are limiting it to the 1st-gen Snapdragon chips right now). The Venue Pro is no different from the rest of the WP7 crowd, with the QSD8250, 512MB of memory, and 8-16GB of flash built in.
An interesting note about the RAM is that the phone only displays 256MB of memory, if you use the Marketplace app called “SystemInfo”. However, Dell clarified that there is actually 512MB of memory, but some of it was used by the operating system prior to being made available to applications, causing the app to report the amount of RAM incorrectly. Either way, the Venue Pro performs like every other Windows Phone 7 device, both in real world usage and in our browser benchmarks, so it’s not too big of a deal. These benchmarks just demonstrate how much Microsoft needs to improve the JS performance in IE9 Mobile to be competitive with Apple and Google.
Battery life is a mixed bag, pretty mediocre overall. It’s better than the Focus, but both the Focus and the Venue Pro lag behind the Surround and Optimus 7 by a ways due to the AMOLED screens. As Anand explained in his review of the Focus and Optimus 7, the amount of white pixels in our web-browsing test tend to hurt AMOLED displays significantly more than LCDs, which is why the Venue Pro comes off so poorly in the battery test. If you use the darker WP7 theme, the phone actually lasts longer than you’d expect given the showing in the battery tests.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
tipoo - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
The code names were cooler than the final names. Thunder, Lightning, Flash, and Smoke sounded awesome.VivekGowri - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I completely agree with that, hence the title. How awesome would it be to carry a phone called the Lightning? Woulda gone well with the HTC Thunderbolt too.aegisofrime - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
For some reason those codenames reminded me of Warcraft 3therealnickdanger - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
So awesome. :)zipz0p - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking - I actually happened to be playing the soundtrack myself as I was reading it, totally coincidentally. Good work Vivek!magicrog - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I don't care what the phone is called - I have an iphone and to be honest the signal pick up is worse then when I had my nokia 6310 and battery life is awful.If it has a great name - lets hope the phone lives up to it.
http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/magician-surrey.html
FATCamaro - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Lousy speed, lousy camera, lousy battery life, lousy screen compared to Android devices and iphone. Yet the author thinks this could be a winner. Amazing!Flunk - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
He says the screen is very good and most people don't care at all about the camera. If they did they wouldn't be using a phone because all phone cameras are worthless.IE really is a big problem but at least they're trying to fix it.
On another topic, there are no IM clients for Windows Phone 7 because sockets support hasn't been released yet so it's not possible to write IM clients unless you're tunneling through a HTTP connection which is far from ideal.
VivekGowri - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
The screen is good - it's a little bit dimmer than the Focus and Nexus one, but it's not a bad screen at all. Battery life on the AMOLED devices really depends on how much white is being displayed on the screen - that makes a huge difference in how much power the displays consume, and in our battery life test, that puts AMOLED devices at an inherent disadvantage compared to LCD screens.Also, as much as I hate to say it, when I said winner, I meant relative to other WP7 devices. Which lowers the bar for a successful device significantly.
Microsoft really needs to fast track their updates and get the second generation devices out as soon as possible. The faster they can gain back ground on Apple and Google, the faster they get some meaningful marketshare. Nokia will help with that, but MS shouldn't be depending on them, they need to get some success with the rest of the partners too.
NoSoMo - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I have to say, you guys could have done much better on the pics....I've come to expect so much more from ya.....