Dell Venue Review | new dell product | dell production | full properties | full display

Attractive but outdated.

Attractive design; Solid build; Gorgeous display; Good camera; Powerful loudspeaker; Convenient Silent mode switch.

Last generation hardware and software; Power button inconveniently placed; 720p video is an interpolated mess; No DivX/Xvid playback; No HDMI-out; No video call camera; Dell Stage is sluggish; Low volume in headphones; Camera lens gets easily covered with

Expert Review



Dell Venue
MRP: Rs 29,990
Street Price: ~ Rs 22,499


While talking about high-end Android phones, we often tend to miss out on the Dell Venue. Although the phone has been in the market for a while now, it has failed to create a stir in a way that phones from Samsung or HTC manage to do. I think it may have something to do with the high launch price. However, now that the price has stabilized, it deserves to be taken a look at.

Bundle

• Dell Venue
• Battery
• Charger
• USB
• cable
• Stereo headset
• 16 GB microSD card

Design And Build If you have only seen the Venue in photographs, you will know that it is an attractive looking device. In reality, it appears even better. It sports a premium look and feel to it, which goes beyond whatever I've seen from either Samsung as well as HTC. The metal sides feel good to hold and although the phone is a bit heavy, it's not excessively so. The weight and build quality give the feeling of a solid device that is worth the price tag.

On the right side, you will find the volume control button and camera shutter button. On the opposite side is a convenient Silent mode switch like the one on the iPhone. On the top is a 3.5 mm headphone jack and on its right is a power button. Right-handed users may find the latter's location inconvenient. It's also pretty small and hard to press. On Androids, it also works as the lock switch, so you have to press it regularly. This ends up being bothersome. On the bottom are located the loudspeaker grille, microphone, and micro-USB port.

On the back, you will find an 8 megapixel camera lens and single LED flash. The former is positioned such that you often end up covering it with your finger while shooting. Below the battery cover is a microSD card slot; thankfully, you don't have to remove the battery.

Display

The Venue has an awesome 4.1" AMOLED display. It has pixel dimensions of 800x480, which gives it a pixel density of roughly 227 ppi, which is quite decent. The quality of the display is very good, with rich colours and excellent contrast. Compared to a Galaxy S, the Venue's display is slightly better. The blacks were really black, but not completely black as in the case of other AMOLED displays. You can make out that they are a bit lighter, while the display's border looks darker in comparison. Furthermore, the daylight visibility isn't that great.

The display is covered by Corning's Gorilla Glass, which makes it scratch resistant. Unfortunately, the glass is curved, due to which the viewing angle isn't as good as it could have been. After a certain angle, the curvature of the glass distorts the picture. If you have one of those old CRT displays lying around, you'll know what I mean. In this case, it's actually a bit worse, since there is a slight gap between the display and the curved glass.

The phone has three keys below the display, and for some reason, they have a layout that is neither logical nor common. If you have used other Android phones, you will find that these buttons take some getting used to.

Hardware And Software
The Venue runs on the very first generation Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 SoC with a 1 GHz Scorpion CPU and an Adreno 200 GPU. The phone has 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB of ROM, and ships with a 16 GB memory card. These days, most phones in its class come with at least an MSM8255. Although the hardware does work fine today, a few months down the line, it might struggle when apps with higher requirements hit the market.


Just like the hardware, the Venue runs on the outdated Android 2.2. Dell has made no promises about a future Gingerbread update, but it can't be completely ruled out. Like the Dell Streak, the Venue comes with Dell's Stage UI that puts a bunch of widgets on the screen and a different side-scrolling application drawer. The widgets aren't particularly interesting, while the app drawer runs at an inexplicably low framerate that makes the sliding animation look choppy. I preferred to replace the whole thing with LauncherPro. The Stage UI is the extent of customization that Dell has performed on the Venue. The rest is pretty much stock Android, which I personally prefer.

The phone performed well in our tests . It was pretty fast and I didn't come across any bugs - apart from the weather app that kept crashing in the background even though I didn't use it.


Connectivity And MultimediaThe Venue is a quad-band GSM 3G handset. It supports HSPA, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and A-GPS connectivity. The call quality and network reception were good, and voices on either side were distinctly heard. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and A-GPS too worked well.

The device has an 8 megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash. The image quality of the camera is pretty decent. Daylight images exhibit decent details, although the low-light performance could have been better. Unfortunately, the video recording quality was terrible. I don't know whether it was the test handset or a general problem with the model, but the supposedly 720p recorded video actually looked like an SD video interpolated to look big (and ugly). Lower resolution videos had no issues though.


The music player supports all major formats except for FLAC, which is found in competing Samsung smartphones. It's the same default Android player with basic functionality. The audio quality through the headphones was pretty good, although the volume was quite low. However, with adequate volume levels, the Loudspeaker quality was decent.

The image gallery on the Venue is the default Android 2.2 gallery. Therefore, it resizes images when you view them, but the display quality is so good that you don't really mind it.

The video player is pretty mediocre as well. It lacks support for popular codecs such as DivX and Xvid. You can however install an app such as RockPlayer, which can play those for you. We tried playing 720p videos, and as long as they were MP4, the phone managed to play them well. Finally, the large display also makes for a very good video playback experience.

The battery life is on par with most Android phones. Which means it sucks.

The Venue has a 1400 mAh Li-Ion battery, whose life is mediocre and on par with other Android phones. With all theGoogle services active in the background, while making regular calls, messaging, web browsing, music playback, and application usage, I got a battery life of about a day on a full charge; that too on a 2G network.

A few months ago, the Venue was unappealing because of its high price. Today, it is even less appealing, but that's mostly due to the competition. Instead of paying Rs 22,499 for the Venue, I would rather pay a bit more for the LG Optimus 2x that has a dual-core processor and 1080p video recording. Unless Dell decides to drop the price significantly, I suggest you give it a miss.


Performance: 3.5
Design & Build Quality: 4
Features: 4
Value For Money: 3

Mojo: 3.5