Monday 12 January 2015

Dell announces the thinnest - and one of the best - tablets in the world


The best tablet announced at CES 2015 was definitely the Dell Venue 8 7000. At 6mm thin, it is the slimmest tablet to date but it hasn’t made any sacrifices. The Venue features an 8.4-inch edge-to-edge OLED display which Dell is calling an “infinity display” meaning that the bezel is almost invisible. The screen is also crisp and sharp, with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600.

The tablet is also one of the first to include Intel’s Real Sense 3D camera which allows users to take 8MP images and then refocus them – a technology popularised by trendy camera manufacture Lytro. There are two an additional 720p stereoscopic sensors to make the depth camera possible.

A large speaker and a 2MP camera for video calls and #selfies foot the screen on the front of the device.

The Venue has 16GB storage (plus a MicroSD card slot for additional storage), 2GB RAM and currently runs Android KitKat however Dell promises that there will be a Lollipop upgrade in the near future.

For $399 you can buy the Venue 8 7000 today in the US – it unfortunately isn’t available anywhere else yet. Dell says it will be coming to other markets in “early 2015” and in my eyes, it will be worth the wait. The only drawback I can see is the fact that this is a tiny tablet; with a screen size of 8.4-inches it is neither a tablet nor a phablet. It is somewhere in the middle. I can imagine most people wishing this tablet was a few inches bigger.
Impossibly thin: The Dell Venue 8 7000 is 6mm thick