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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ruthan - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Tablets without integrated 3G/4G/LTE modem are absolute, tablet for home use is ridiculous, same using with cell phone Wifi hotspot.althaz - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Tablets with integrated modem are absolute garbage. Not using your existing phone or wi-fi connection for internet is simply ridiculous.Gunbuster - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Not to mention they keep trying to unload really terrible tablets with built in modems. My Verizon guy keeps emailing about the Ellipsis 7 Crap Tablet. yeah no thanks...secretmanofagent - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Cell phones are absolute garbage. Not using your own body as a mobile hotspot is simply ridiculous.wewantsthering - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
You should win a prize for this comment! Laughed so hard! :-)p1esk - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Nice!akdj - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Unless you 'need' your phone for the day, 'using your existing phone (sic wifi) for Internet is ridiculous'. Indeed. I concurBut as an owner of each iPad. A half dozen Android tabs, ½ with, ½ without LTE --- I've YET to find an iPad 'with an intersted modem (that is) "absolute garbage"'
My iPad Air 2 is getting consistent speeds of 60-75 Mb/s down, 45-50 up. That's fast as hell without wires. And consistently stable. Maybe it's time you tried 'one' (ya know, with a modem?)
Sushisamurai - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
The above comments are pretty funny, especially with the sarcasm, for those who didn't catch that.As for cellular hotspots, I don't see what's the issue? In today's world, there's a multitude of ways to charge your phone on the go - in the car, at the office, while ur walking, pushing a stroller, riding your bicycle, a mobile battery pack, a solar powered battery pack etc. I would also assume that most wireless carriers also offer free wifi at certain locations just for being a data subscriber (at least where I live, we have this feature; the concept was to remove congestion from the 3G/4G networks in higher density areas). So, even if I didn't have a cellular data modem in my ipad, the coffee shop or random place I'm at usually has some form of free wifi or at least my subscriber's wifi. For the odd times I dont, I just use my cellular hotspot. It also costs less per month as I don't need a tablet data plan. I have a mini with LTE and with my purchases of the Air 2, I opted for wifi, as I barely used my LTE data on the mini
phoenix_rizzen - Monday, March 16, 2015 - link
How does that work when your phone isn't in the same location as your tablet, and you want to access the Internet from the tablet, and there isn't wifi available?WereCatf - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
"tablet for home use is ridiculous" -- Uh, why? If you only want to consume content why in your mind would a laptop or a desktop be somehow utterly superior?