People who invest in a tablet when they already own a phone and a PC, expect their purchase to be a jack-of-all-trades. They demand dual connectivity — through Wi-Fi as well as 3G. They want to have basic office productivity features. And they want the best video and music quality they can get.
The latest edition of Dell’s tablet, the Venue 8 model 3840, meets all such expectations handsomely. It is an 8-inch phablet with a slot for a 3G SIM; a generous 16GB of internal storage (expandable through micro SD) with 1GB of RAM and a dual core Intel chip running Android Kitkat 4.4. There is a 5MP front and 2MP rear camera.
The icing on the cake is a 1920x1200 IPS display, which is a shade better even than full HD. The audio is no slouch either — MaxxAudio Mobile from Waves which belts out a loud 70-80 decibels — better than most tablets this size. In tandem with the display, this is made for some of the best movie experience I have had on a tablet — that too just from YouTube.
The makers have thrown in Polaris Office, a free combo of word-excel-PPT clones that worked well enough for me. Your purchase also entitles you to store files in Pocket Cloud with a year’s free 20GB DropBox.
Dell has not bothered to add any additional camera software to the default vanilla-plain Android app and I think they missed something here. That said, the Dell Venue 8 seems to be excellent value for the online price of around Rs 17,000 against an MRP of Rs 18,999.
