Dell's super thin, aluminum Venue 8 7000 is a surprisingly solid Android tablet

Android tablets have had a rough go of things since the very beginning. For years, Android tablet makers were chasing one bad idea after another, until Google landed on the Nexus 7 and actually came up with a compelling counter to Apple’s larger and more expensive iPad.
It led to a wave of low-end Android tablets that have sold well (especially in China), but often feel more like big phones than tablets. Then Google kind of gave up on the Nexus 7, and the newer Nexus 9 doesn’t really compete in the ways that it needs to. With the tablet market tapering off even for Apple, it’s a bit of a surprise that device makers are even bothering with new Android tablets any more.

But companies are indeed bothering to make new designs and try different approaches to the tried and true tablet formula. The latest of which is Dell, which recently launched the clumsily named Venue 8 7000 Series (I’m just going to call it the Venue 8). The $399 Venue 8 is part of a design renaissance at Dell (along with the new XPS 13 laptop), showcasing premium materials and killer displays. It also acts as a vehicle for some never-before-seen mobile technologies from Intel. There are really two things that matter with the Venue 8, and they're why anyone is spending time talking about it: its design and its camera array.



The Venue 8’s chassis is anodized aluminum, a material not often seen outside of Apple’s tablets. It’s dark grey and cold to the touch, but it makes the Dell feel classy and worthy of its four hundred dollar price tag (in stark contrast to the Nexus 9, which doesn’t feel a bit worth its cost when you pick it up). It’s also cold and industrial looking, almost like a Soviet counterpart to the iPad, but it has a remarkably efficient design and is assembled well. The power button and volume keys are also tactile and solid, though they are a little too flush with the body and placed all the way in the upper left of the tablet, which isn’t particularly convenient. There is this really cool feature that turns on the display automatically when you pick the tablet up and turns it off when you put it down. I was shocked how consistently and reliably this worked.



The very small borders around the display (which measure a scant 5mm, according to Dell) make the screen seem larger than it actually is. But that’s forced Dell to jam stereo speakers and a front-facing camera into an awkward "chin" below the screen. The chin is the only place you can hold the tablet without activating the touch screen, but it means you’re pinching the bottom 10 percent of the tablet, leaving the other 90 percent unsupported. That’s fine for a few minutes, but it gets fatiguing quickly.



Flip the Venue 8 over and you find not one, but three camera sensors. They work together to form a depth-sensing array, much like the DuoLens camera on HTC’s One M8 smartphone. The main, 8-megapixel sensor takes the actual photos, while the dual 720p cameras can measure distance and determine depth information. That lets you do things like artificially blur the background or isolate your subject with color while making the rest of the photo black and white.




The Venue 8 can even act as a digital tape measurer, telling you how tall certain objects in the frame are. But unsurprisingly, all of these tricks require ideal lighting conditions, and don’t work well in the dimly lit rooms where so many pictures are actually taken. You wouldn’t want to use the Venue 8 to draw the blueprints for your next home, that’s for sure. The special camera array may actually be the whole reason Intel and Dell built this tablet, but it’s not a reason for you to buy one.