Tablet sales have been slowly dropping all over the world and not just in Samsung’s and Apple’s back yard. Still, once in a while there comes a tablet that has some real potential of becoming a hit with the masses. One of those tablets is the new Dell Venue 8 7000. What makes the new tablet from Dell more interesting than the others is its interesting design, great camera and some other great specs and features.

Dell has been putting out Android and Windows tablets for quite a while now, but nothing really did stand out, which is why the Dell Venue is such a pleasant surprise. The new Dell Venue 8 7000 has the potential to do just that, stand out and put Dell on the tablet market.

Dell Venue 8 7000 Review

The Dell Venue 8 7000 was announced in October of last year and it became available in July of 2015. Before we start the review, let’s just swiftly present the new tablet from Dell, the Dell Venue 8 7000.

It is a $399 Android tablet with an incredibly sleek design (just 0.23 inches thick), a great OLED display, good battery life and an Intel RealSense 3D camera setup that delivers good pictures. The tech specs of the new Dell Venue 8 7000 even won a Best of CES Award, so it has all the markings of a great tablet are here. But is the new flagship tablet from Dell really a great tablet? Let’s see!

Design

One of the most impressive things about the Dell Venue 8 7000 is the fact that right now, it is the thinnest tablet available on the market. That’s right, the Dell Venue 8 7000 is even thinner than Apple’s iPad Air 2.

The Dell Venue 8 7000 has an incredible sleek design with barely any bezels (except for the one at the bottom). To operate the RealSense camera, you need to flip the 8.4-inch device, so that you don’t obstruct any of its three rear cameras or its speakers.

Having tested the Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet, we can safely say that it is a pleasure holding the device for longer periods of time. The grip is very comfortable and even if the device is very thin, it doesn’t feel like it is going to fall apart in your hands, while you’re using it.

Dell surprised a lot of people when they launched this tablet, and we admit that almost no people to whom we have showed it, guessed it came from Dell. The majority of them thought HTC, because it does look a tiny bit like an oversized HTC One. We, and so should Dell, took the HTC One resemblance as a compliment.

Dell Venue 8 7000 Technical Specifications

The new Dell Venue 8 7000 has some impressive stuff under its hood. It has a crisp 2,560 x 1,600, 8.4-inch display with a pixel density of 361 (Apple’s iPad Mini 3 has 326). What makes the display really impressive is the fact that it’s OLED, which gives great viewing angles and amazing colors.

The tablet is powered by a quad-core 2.3 GHz Intel Atom Z3580 processor with Intel HD Graphics. It comes with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage that can be expanded to a whopping 512GB through a microSD card. It’s also got multitouch, up to 10 fingers, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, GPS and microUSB v2.0.

The Dell Venue 8 7000 weighs 0.67 pounds, which makes it lighter than its Apple counterpart, the iPad Mini 3, which weighs 0.73 pounds. It has all the right ports, in all the right places and on its left side, the power button and the volume one.

What’s so Cool about the Camera?

We’ve kept mentioning the camera, but what is so cool about this RealSense camera on the Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet? Well, it’s a camera like you’ve never seen before. While Dell calls it 3D, the term isn’t really accurate. Intel’s RealSense camera is more of a depth-sensing camera.

The camera on the back are actually three cameras: the main 8MP camera coupled with two stereoscopic 720p cameras on each side of the main one. This allows the tablet to collect several layers of depth information.

When you take a picture in the depth-sensing mode (you need to be in this mode, otherwise the picture will just be a normal photo), you’re actually taking more shots of the same thing: one photo has the focus in the background, another in the foreground and so on and so forth. Thanks to this depth-sensing mode, you’re able to do some fascinating things with your photos.

Use the Dell Gallery to adjust the focus in the photo after the photo has been taken. Because the photo is actually more photos mashed up into a single photo, you can add effects selectively (think about a child being in color and the background in black and white). It saves plenty of hours tinkering in Photoshop, that’s for sure!

You won’t always need to shoot your photos in depth-sensing mode, but it’s a great feature to have.

Battery Life

Battery life is actually a big selling point for the Dell Venue 8 7000. While Dell says the tablet is good for around 10 hours of battery life, we clocked it at around 12 hours of video playback which took us by surprise. We thought it would be below the 10 hours that Dell estimated, but it appears that Dell isn’t just being honest, they’re being pessimistic. We found that the Dell Venue is only outperformed in the battery field by the Sony Xperia Z3 tablet and the Apple iPad Mini 3, both having a battery life of around 14 hours of video playback. This means that the new Dell tablet is not going to leave you when the going gets tough, in terms of battery, naturally.

Operating System and Features

The Dell Venue 8 7000 is an Android tablet. Dell did the right thing by sticking to Android and more than that, not tinkering with the Android by adding their own spin to it. The Dell Venue 8 7000 comes preloaded with Android KitKat 4.4 and it has zero alterations to the operating system.

A Dell spokesperson revealed that in a month or so, the new Dell Venue 8 7000 is going to get upgraded to the latest Android OS, Lollipop, which was unveiled last year in June and made available in November of 2014. We think that Dell opted for KitKat because it was safe and reliable and the moment Lollipop gained Dell’s trust, it got introduced into the Venue 8 7000.

The Dell Venue 8 7000 comes with some apps pre-installed, which is something that not many people like. Rest assured, all those apps can be uninstalled. The tablet comes with The Weather Channel, MaxxAudio, McAfee Security, UnoFriends, Polaris Office, Ice Age Adventures, Skitch, Flixster, Evernote, Vine, Evernote and Dropbox (with a whopping 20GB of free storage for one year). That’s pretty much all the bloatware that’s present on the tablet!

The coolest feature of the Dell Venue 8 7000 is its Dell Gallery, that is set up to sync with your Picasa, Dropbox and Facebook account.

You can view all your photos by locations and dates taken and if you sync your Facebook to your tablet, then you’ve got a third gallery automatically tagging recurring faces and making separate albums for each person in your photos. Naturally, you can deactivate this feature and tag the photos yourself. The gallery is cool, easy to navigate and very intuitive.

One Configuration to Rule Them All

At this moment, Dell is offering its customers just one configuration for the Dell Venue 8 7000: the 16GB model that costs $399. This actually acts as a pro, instead of a con, because it gives its owners the ability to upgrade to as much GB as they want, without shelling out too much money. With the microSD card, you can upgrade to a whopping 512 GB, so it actually doesn’t make any sense for Dell to offers more configurations.

In terms of accessories, we recommend you buy a case (that costs around $40) that will help prop the Dell Venue 8 7000 up, so that you avoid covering the speakers and the screen.

Another pretty cool folio that you can buy for $90 actually adds a built-in Bluetooth keyboard, which is going to prove useful to those who use their tablets for writing mails and documents.

Dell Venue 8 7000’s Competition

Any tablet buyer will go through at least a couple of tablets before deciding on one, so this is why we believe that the taking a gander at what the competition has to offer isn’t just important, it’s mandatory!

So who is the Dell Venue 8 7000’s competition? The main competitor is Apple’s iPad Mini 3, of course. Both tablets are incredibly slim, with Dell being just a smidge thinner. T

hey’re both priced at $399 and have 16GB of internal storage, but the Dell has a crisper screen. When it comes to battery life, even though the Dell Venue 8 7000 is a beast, the iPad Mini 3 has a better battery life. But camera is where the Dell comes out a winner!

Another very similar tablet to the Dell Venue 8 7000 is the NVIDIA Shield Tablet and the Samsung Tab S. The NVIDIA is aimed at gamers and the Samsung, is an all-around decent tablet.

Samsung users (and they are quite a lot), will probably prefer the Samsung tablet, but if you love Android, you could try the Dell Venue 8 7000, just because the Galaxy Tab S is almost one year old and Samsung is getting ready for a refresh.

Final Thoughts

While the new Dell Venue 8 7000 isn’t what one would call a cheap tablet, it is one that is worth every penny. The thin and sleek design, paired up with the long battery life, great HD screen and flawless build quality make the Dell Venue 8 7000 one of the best Android tablets you can buy at the moment.

Intel’s RealSense 3D camera may look like a gimmick to some, but if you’re a photography fan, we are absolutely certain it is going to delight you. Cameras on tablets have always been very poorly received and we believe that the new Dell Venue 8 7000 is going to change that. It’s not just a point-and-shoot camera, which helps users feel like they’re actually involved in the whole picture-taking process.

Sure, it’s not a perfect tablet as the speaker and rear camera can often be blocked by fingers, but it’s just a drop in a vast ocean of coolness, with the Dell Venue 8 7000. Another thing that many users, including ourselves have noticed is that the Dell Venue 8 7000 can get pretty hot during use. Only time will tell if performance is affected by this.

In conclusion, the Dell Venue 8 7000 is an impressive slim and smart tablet that we believe is going to sell and captivate its users.