Android tablets have always failed to beat Apple’s iPad over the years both hardware and software wise, however Dell this year stands up to the challenge with its new Venue 8. The Venue 8’s chassis is anodised aluminium, 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 Shs1.1m price tag. It is a small tablet with an 8.4-inch screen, but it’s actually narrower and just 6mm thick, which uses an Intel processor with 2.3GHz, quad-core Atom that lasts for nine hours and 15 minutes at maximum usage. The Venue 8 comes with 16GB of internal storage, but there’s a Micro SD card slot available, so you can expand if needed.
Flip the Venue 8 over and one finds not one, but three camera sensors. They work together to form a depth-sensing array. The main, 8-megapixel sensor takes the actual photos, while the dual 720p cameras can measure distance and determine depth information. The Venue 8 can even act as a digital tape measurer, telling one how tall certain objects in the frame are. It comes with Android 4.4 KitKat which is updatable to android 5.0 lollipop, with a couple of apps for managing sound profiles and connecting to Dell’s tablet accessories.
