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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Brandon Chester - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
According to Dell, there is no update yet. Hardwarezone must be mistaken.GeekBrains - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link
Checked with DELL support and it's available already.PC Perv - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
Z3580 is more than competitive but the tablet is sluggish? Did you not think of checking whether Intel is cheating the benchmarks? I am sure you would have, if you were reviewing tablets from other vendors.And you keep parroting "AMOLED not made by Samsung," (I counted no less than 3 times). Then who made the screen? How do you know it is not made by Samsung, and if you have that information why not share it?
Oh and please keep it to recommendation for users. Your trying to advise an OEM is rather funny.
coolhardware - Thursday, March 12, 2015 - link
I would like to know more about the screen as well!It seems to be tied with Samsung as the highest pixel density tablet (non-phone) display out there?!
http://pixensity.com/list/tablet/:
Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 (2014)
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 (2014)
Dell Dell Venue 8 7840 (2015)
All three of these have:
8.4″ 31.71 square inches (7.1″x4.5″) 2560×1600 16:10 359.39 PPI
JoshHo - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
All of our benchmarks are designed to defeat benchmark detection mechanisms. The issues with performance are due to Android 4.4 and Dalvik. We saw massive improvements in performance for almost any device updated from 4.4 to 5.0.Brandon's statement regarding AMOLED displays refers to the device OEM.
While we welcome feedback, our writers are human. Please avoid personal attacks.
PC Perv - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
You two are surely protective each other. I know the feeling.akdj - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
You must. With that hamdleakdj - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
(Sp!). HandleSushisamurai - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
I actually prefer recommendations to OEM - sure it may be considered subliminal messaging to the readers, but I'd like to think the review community like AT helped submerse the cheating done on android phones back in the day. AT was one of the first in terms of big review sites that caught the cheating and called OEMs on it, which in turn made us readers also aware and called them on it. There's all so many cases where they've done a laptop review, made some recommendations to OEM, and the next gen laptop remedied the issue. Maybe AT wasnt the sole deciding factor for the change, but every little bit helps when it comes to consumer advocacy to big corporations. We as consumers also benefit from their recommendations, so long as their recommendations are logical and objectiveSushisamurai - Sunday, March 15, 2015 - link
Lol, subvert, not submerse