Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Its a 8" tablet weighing less than the iPad mini but runs Full Windows 8.1, how cool is that? This is what I have been wanting for a long long time - a tablet that lets me consume content, and when I don't have access to a regular PC, it will let me do some actual work! And full Windows means - you can run any windows application, get multiple user profiles and the whole shebang! Ordered from Amazon for $252.65 on Nov. 3rd and got it Nov 5th - Amazon Prime rocks! Comes in a slim plastic body that actually feels and looks quite good, has the spiraled textured back which provides an excellent grip. 1 micro-SD card slot and 1 micro-USB port. No Sim Card slot. A mono but adequate speaker - if you want stereo you will have to plug in a headphone/external/Bluetooth speaker. In the box you will get a charger and a USB/micro-USB Cable - that's it. Cold booting to Windows takes about 10 seconds. updated the BIOS - took about 8 minutes. Ran Windows updates - about 200MB. Installed some apps - Evernote touch, dropbox, kindle... watched YouTube, Hulu, amazon prime and Netflix, read some PDFs - I have to say the metro PDF viewer really shines in tablet form factor. Next Morning, I decided it was a keeper and ordered an OTG Cable, Micro-SD Card and the Stylus from Dell. I haven't run any intensive applications on it, but the maximum I was able to push it was up to 89% memory use. I was little concerned about the 2GB memory and the eMMC storage. But after I ran passmark PC performance test, it appeared this thing was performing on par with the low end 65W TDP CPU s - like a core 2 duo or a mobile core i3 even, and this is only a 5W CPU, I have to say, hats off to Intel! Way better than the Eee PCs - with which we mostly associate the Atom CPU s. you can see a screenshot of my passmark results. Crystal Diskmark revealed pretty impressive disk performance - I only hope that it will last past the warranty period. Next I wanted to see how it performed compared to other "tablets" on the market. So, I ran geekbench 3, and here are the results and some comparison - Geekbench 3 Results - Device Single Core Multi Core Dell Venue Pro 8 789 2525 Asus Nexus 7 622 1891 iPad mini 262 498 iPad 4th Gen 784 1427 Galaxy Note 10.1 392 1073 Amazon Kindle Fire 337 614 Acer Iconia W3 437 1106 Needless to say, This little beauty performs exceptionally well. Before I knew it, my OTG cable and micro-SD cards were here. The micro-USB port is used to charge the battery and also works as a USB host with a USB OTG cable. It does not function as mtp. Downside to this dual purpose port is that you can't charge and connect to peripherals simultaneously. could not successfully power a regular portable USB drive or slim DVD drive, But it detects an USB keyboard just fine and you can get to the BIOS. One other thing i tried was a generic USB Ethernet adapter and it worked! You can boot from a Retail Windows 8.1 USB Stick, but that's as far as you will be able to go, Dell hasn't made available the touch screen drivers. After getting the cable, I moved the recovery partition to a thumb drive (you need a minimum of 8GB), deleted the recovery partition, and ran disk cleanup - at this point I had a total of 17.5GB out of 27.9GB free - plus the 32GB on the micro-SD card, I think i will survive. pretty much anything video, audio, pdf etc all opens and runs just fine from the sd card. A lot of people have complained about the automatic display settings, but it was a bit too bright for my taste when i turned the auto brightness off. Ran the Windows battery report, since i have used it for a few days now. It appears it got almost 10 hours of full use, you can see the screenshot of that report. Dell really screwed up the shipping for my stylus, delayed it twice. I am not an artist, nor have ever used any active stylus extensively. This appeared to work reasonably well for me in One Note and Windows Journal, with some occasional slipping of the pen or a bit of a too much sensitivity. This is one thing I am not too thrilled about in general about the touch screen of this device - its just a bit too much touchy at times, a single key touch will get 2,3 letters and sometime the zooming in/out and scrolling tends to slip too. I don't know what kind of glass they are using, its not listed in Corning Gorilla Glass site. After almost a week of using this tablet, I am beginning to wonder why Microsoft had to take almost a Billion dollars write off on the Surface RT? Windows 8 is actually a pretty good OS, the Metro UI is much better than anything out there - IMHO, including IOS (I own a 1st & 3rd gen iPad) and of Course Android. I think they should have kept the RT limited to just Metro, and for the Desktop part, they could have put in an option to selectively turn on the touch friendly Metro UI only if the PC detected that it has a touch screen - or something like that. That way people would be much less confused. The 2 UIs and the sudden loss of the familiar start button has been a pretty big shock for the users. Maybe they didn't foresee Intel being able to make a 5W x86 processor that's almost as good as a desktop CPU? if Intel continues like this, maybe in a few years our smart phones will be x86 instead of ARM? that will be fun! Update 12/23/2013 Like a lot of other folks, at the beginning I thought why on earth would Dell put the Windows button like that on the side in the Venue Pro 8? Well after using the Venue 11 Pro, I think I like the placement of the Windows button much better on the Venue Pro 8. The capacitive Windows button interferes too much specially if you are trying to use the Pen in landscape mode.