JoltVib

The display is the most important part of any tablet, and it’s a good thing the screen on the Dell is a stunner. It’s packed with pixels — 2560 down and 1600 across, to be precise — and is very bright and saturated. Almost too much so: the colors practically scream off the panel, similar to Samsung screens from a couple years ago (the Venue 8 used an OLED panel, so that isn’t hugely surprising). For movies and gaming, the oversaturated colors worked to the Dell’s advantage: explosions leapt off the screen, and the goat in Goat Simulator never looked better. But I wouldn’t rely on the Venue 8 for photo editing, which requires a display with more accurate color reproduction. For reading, which is what I most often use a tablet for, it’s too bright on automatic settings, requiring me to crank it all the way down. Thankfully the lowest setting is dimmer than other tablets, making it work pretty well for reading in bed.

In addition to its unique design, the Venue 8 uses an Intel processor, a relative rarity among mobile devices. It’s a 2.3GHz, quad-core Atom chip paired with 2GB of RAM and it provides a fast and responsive experience. If the Venue 8 didn’t have a big Intel logo emblazoned on the back of it, I wouldn’t have assumed it was powered by anything different than the standard Qualcomm fare. Games played smoothly, and though the tablet got warm in spots, it never got uncomfortable to hold (unlike the Nexus 9). The Atom chip is power-efficient, too: the Venue 8 lasted for 9 hours and 15 minutes on our rundown test and had no problem going for multiple days in normal usage. The Venue 8 has a meager 16GB of internal storage, but there’s a Micro SD card slot available, so you can expand if needed.

For all of its unique hardware features, the software on the Dell is refreshingly straightforward. It’s a mostly untouched version Android 4.4 KitKat (Dell says an update to Android 5.0 Lollipop is planned for the "coming months"), with a couple of apps for managing sound profiles and connecting to Dell’s tablet accessories. There’s a custom gallery app that can pull in images from Facebook, Dropbox, and Picasa, letting you see pictures from your cloud accounts next to ones you actually take with the tablet. It’s a nice concept, but it could use some better organization: Facebook images aren’t grouped into albums, for instance.

The usual complaints with Android apps on tablets still apply to the Dell: there are just so many popular apps that don’t make use of the larger display. It’s not really Dell’s fault if Facebook and Twitter don’t want to bother improving their apps for larger Android devices, but the Venue 8 suffers as a result. Combined with the high pixel density of the screen, many interface elements are small, requiring me to squint and precisely tap on-screen buttons. Dell could have tweaked Android to work better on the high-resolution panel, but it hasn’t done so, and the Venue 8’s experience is worse off for it.

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