Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to try out the Dell Venue 7 and use it as a test device but also a day to day media tablet.
The Good: The tablet ships with a fairly recent version of Android: 4.2.2. Additionally, the UX is pretty much stock Android — in fact, I’m at a strain to find anywhere that Dell has significantly modified the OS. At $150, it is nothing if not affordable. This low price point is made all the more impressive by the beautiful screen that holds up fairly well to its higher-end competitors.
The Bad: Unlike most popular Android tablets, the Venue is based on an Intel chipset. Taken by itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there is a trend of developers (especially mobile game developers) tweaking their software to optimize for Tegra and SnapDragon processors — or more broadly put, developers of high-end Android software, have been optimizing for ARM systems. In fact, on a few higher end games, I’ve seen a bit of sputtering on the Venue that I don’t see on the Nexus 7.
The Ugly: Dell’s decision to go with Intel also seems to have affected the industrial design of the tablet. It is noticeably thicker than the Nexus 7 and feels like it is a year or two behind the likes of the Nexus and Nokia’s Sirius tablet in terms of its industrial design aesthetic.
Conclusion: Dell’s’ Venue 7 is not a bad tablet by any means and will probably excel in certain arenas where price matters more than performance: ie corporate deployments. However, if you can spring for the Nexus 7, then you’ll probably be a bit happier with Google’s tablet.
