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Dell Venue 8 7000, "World's Thinnest Tablet" With Intel Moorefield Atom Reviewed
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Dell recently launched their Android-based Venue 8 7000 slate, claiming it's the "world's thinnest" tablet. It measures a mere 6 millimeters thick, or 0.24 inches and change. That's 0.1mm slimmer than Apple's iPad Air 2 and 1.5mm flatter than the iPad mini 3, giving Dell full bragging rights, even if by a hair. Dell also opted for an Intel Atom Z3580 processor under the hood, clocked at up to 2.3GHz. This quad-core part is built on Intel's 22nm Moorefield microarchitecture. Compared to its Bay Trail predecessor, Moorefield comes in a smaller package with superior thermal attributes, as well as better graphics performance, courtesy of its PowerVR G6430 graphics core. The Venue 8 7000 also features one of the best 8-inch OLED displays on the market, with edge-to-edge glass and a 2560x1600 resolution. Finally, the Venue 8 7000 is also the first to integrate Intel's RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera, which offers interesting re-focusing and stereoscopic effects, with potentially other, more interesting use cases down the road. Performance-wise, the Venue 8 7000 is solid enough though not a speedster, putting out metrics in the benchmarks that place it in the middle of the pack of premium tablets on the market currently."
Lots of superlatives there, but does it play flappy bird?
90% of the space in a modern tablet is the battery, a thin tablet is like an anorexic supermodel, really needs a bit of beef on the bones or it likely to feint after a few minutes work.
"Word's Thinnest Tablet" - has slashdot joined the mainstream media?
0.1 mm thinner than the competing models? Seriously? Is it even noticeable without a precision caliber?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
So I could replace the screen on my laptop with this tablet and get a better resolution and the screen could run a native X server with a little prodding?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I understand that thin equals lighter, and so for a laptop or tablet, there is some advantage, but I wonder if this "thinnest whatever" craze is useful after a certain point? How do these "paper thin" devices feel in the hand? Are they so susceptible to damage that you need to buy a case anyway? What about the internals? Heat kills electronics... Sure, "thin is sexy", but I want something that feels good in the hands, is light but not feather light, and doesn't burn my nuts if I leave it on my lap too long. I sort-of lust after a Mac Book, but my ThinkPad is substantial enough that I don't worry about breaking it just by looking at it, and from NASA pictures, they seem to feel the same way, the ISS has quite a few installed.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
But will it bend ?
Thickness is a useless criterion for judging tablets unless there are drastic differences like a tablet being a half inch thick. What makes more sense is to compare relative tablet weight.
Who the hell decided to call something "Dell Venue 8 7000"? You don't put two numbers one after another, it's just stupid!
Time to fire the marketing guys!
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PowerVR drivers and linux.
It gets blown away in terms of speed by ARM based tablets, not to mention how sadly it compares to an iPad Air 2, gets mediocre battery scores and doesn't have the legacy advantage it would have if it ran Windows.
I don't know that I've ever read a more forgiving review.
Only one thing should count when designing for a form factor: The user. Weight, size, and shape should be selected for the best user experience. Make the last as long as possible whilst conforming to a size that allows a screen big enough to keep people happy and a weight light enough to keep people happy.
When I see a manufacturer touting a metric no one cares about the ads sound to me like "We can't compete so we're going to insult your intelligence instead."
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Okay, actually, 100 microns (0.1mm) is a reasonable diameter for a human hair. So, kudos for the phrasing!
Do the editors even proof-read their submissions before approval? Word's Thinnest? I think they meant "World's Thinnest".
No, that would be any tablet with Windows on it.
Thanks slashdot for convincing me to slap an adblocker on my phone!
I like how difficult it is to touch that teeny "hide/change to survey" tab at the bottom too.
Looks like Dice is well on it's way to making this site look like a malware toilet bowl!
....millions of people have been saying - I wish my tablet was thinner.
It mentions in a couple places that the tablet ships with Android 4.4, and Dell hasn't said when it's getting 5.0. But they "have a feeling" Dell will be doing so soon!
Because companies have such a stellar track record of providing Android updates for released hardware...
#DeleteChrome
Well?
I mean, like really, do we need *another* Windows Abor... er ... 8?
Do. Not. Want.
Have a nice time.
Lemme guess at the retail price... $7000?
If you watch the video review in the article, the gallery app has a measuring tool. The reviewer measures the height of the Golden Gate Bridge, oddly enough doesn't pick up on the fact that the app has claimed the bridge is 37ft tall.
According the google the bridge is 220ft. I'm not sure who should be more embarrassed Intel or the reviewer.
please stop with the hothardware reviews. Or at least go find a better site with up to date stuff. hell even the wall street journal reviewed Dell Venue a month before hothardware everyone else reviewed these 2 months ago.
The reviewer should be embarrassed, and so should you for not reading up on RealSense, but it's probably unintentional.
The error is because stereo depth accuracy is quadratic, it degrades as the square of the distance to the sensors. The distance (baseline) between the cameras in a RealSense unit is so small that any distance measured beyond a few metres is inaccurate. It was a stupid thing to demonstrate, but it shows that many reviewers (and users it seems) don't understand the limitations of 3D measurement systems. For this reason, Intel clearly states that RealSense is only good up to 10m (and even then I would be sceptical that it works well beyond 5).
This is easily verifiable with your eyes. As an object gets further away, it becomes harder and harder to determine its distance because the optical parallax of the object tends to zero (i.e. it appears in the same x-position on each of your 'sensors'). Try it next time you're in a car or on a train, we all know that nearby objects appear to whizz past while background features like mountains/hills remain stationary.
Specifically the error equation is dZ = Z^2/bf (the distance measurement is is Z = bf/d where d is the disparity (parallax) in pixels)
Where dZ is the distance error, Z is the target distance, b is the baseline and f is the focal length in pixels. I've assumed that you can detect correspondences to within one pixel, realistically it'll be better than that for a competent stereo matching algorithm. Now in this case Z is several hundred metres, b is order 100mm and f order 1000px.
Do the maths: 100^2/(100e-3 * 1000) = around 100m error. At 5m? It's around 25cm and 1m it's 1mm. The actual numbers will be different because I don't know the exact baseline, or the focal length. I can tell you for sure that the cameras aren't high enough resolution for that to make a significant difference to the accuracy.
Xmas saw Staples sell the Linx 8" Win8.1 4-core tab for 50 quid including VAT. Unlike the Dell POS, the Linx has Intel HD graphics, vastly superior to the dreadful experience that is Intel supported PowerVR. PowerVR on Windows platforms is ***TOXIC***, thanks to the world's sh*ttiest drivers from Intel.
On this Linx tab, you can even run Fallout 3 well. You can even play 1080P video via VLC or MPC-HC, and activate shaders to improve the image (try doing that on any Android tab). You can see the files on you NAS DIRECTLY, and never need crap like 'video servers' to stream video- they play like video files on internal storage.
Of course, the insane price-point was a direct consequence of Intel giving away Baytrail, and Microsoft giving away Bing Win 8.1 to Chinese manufacturing companies, but who cares. The Linx 8" rocks hard, with a full-on Desktop Windows experience in a tab format. And NO, you dribbling cretins that are dying to troll, such a tab does not serve a useful purpose trying to run software designed to give an i7 CPU or 980 GPU a hard time. But there are millions of TRUE Windows programs from all the ages of Windows that just run wonderfully on this 4-core, 1GB, Intel HD graphics wonder. Even older versions of Office and Visual studio.
And, of course, you can attach a keyboard, mouse and external display to the Linx and create an astonishing cheap homework/browsing PC.
Expensive tabs are a PATHETIC JOKE these days. Want the best- wait a year til the new model comes out, and the old sells for 40% of the cost. Otherwise look at the best of the cheapo tabs- amongst the crap are some true gems.
PS running a Win8.1 x86 tab? Learn how to de-activate CONNECTED STANDBY else you'll think the tab's battery life is cr*p. One registry change, and you have perfect, zero battery using, HIBERNATION instead.
So who cares about this level of "thinness"?
It just means they could have easily added more battery volume but opted not to.
http://paid4clicks.com?r=41321
Yet again someone proves you can create something that looks very nice, and does not look like an iPad. Too bad about the graphics chip, camera (phone for pictures, not a deal breaker), and old OS.
Can we have the social justice articles back? At least they aren't a blatent slashvert.
No, the name is totally forgettable and fucking hard to differentiate on Dell's website, leading me to purchase another device from another vendor because then I can be certain of what I'm getting.
It's like Sony's laptops, where I can't tell the difference between the WXCa, the WXC, the WYCa, the WYCd and the WXYC and I have to go to a different fucking website to buy each of them. Or just go and buy a laptop from someone that wants me to buy one I want, not whatever wank marketing gimmick they're trying to sell.
Now *you* are participating in Dell's marketing. Whether you like or will remember the name yourself is irrelevant, I'm pointing out that the GGP is participating in spreading the name. Why is it so hard for people to understand more than one point about an issue?
And the beat goes on...
That's assuming it costs the same as the dozen Venue 7000 tablets we just bought for work. That's MSRP. I think they were $1,250 with our volume discount. Given the impressive 2560x1600 resolution versus the 1920x1080 for our Venue 7000 ones, it might be even more expensive. The 8GBytes of RAM is nice though since we have to run XP in virtual machines due to Window's poor\ backwards compatibility. The Microsoft app we run can only run a single copy at a time, so we're suck running three or four XP virtual machines at a time.
Two things:
1) Dell has announced that this tablet is getting Android 5.0. They have also mentioned that it has an unlocked bootloader, so porting Lolipop RIGHT NOW isn't out of the question, if you are impatient.
2) (and this is my real point) Since going private last year, Dell is no longer caught up in a race to the bottom to keep shareholders happy like their (former) competition. For example, the new XPS 13, branded by everyone in the media as the most innovative design since the original MacBook Air (as a Thinkpad user, I respectfully disagree), will support a Linux version once the kernel supports issues with the trackpad and sound system (follow development here: http://bartongeorge.net/tag/project-sputnik -- they already sell a 15" Linux laptop/workstation). That makes Dell the _only_ major computer manufacturer letting you purchase a machine with Linux, which I know isn't really a big deal on Slashdot anymore since Dice attracted a bunch of tumblrtards, but it _used_ to mean something on this website, and for *me* it means that later on this year I will be doing a "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" with Dell (partially because in an age where the operating system matters less than any other time in computing history, Lenovo decided to double-down on Microsoft and doesn't sell machines sans Windows anymore). I think Dell going private yields innovation and in 5 years time we will see it as one of the most recent significant events in personal computing.
By the way, I remember your username from years back. You should come join us at SoylentNews from time to time.
Because you keep harping on the same one point. You seem to buy into the marketing theory that any publicity is good publicity. I don't, and from observation it doesn't really appear that many businesses do either, otherwise "damage control" wouldn't exist.
Dell undoubtedly wants people posting stuff about the 8 700, but they probably don't want people posting that it's a stupid name. If they thought that was a good thing they'd go for the gold and call it the Dell Up Uranus.
Devices are now thin enough that it's only a pissing contest at this point.
Devices are now even thinner than a stream of piss...!
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I'm participating in the marketing? How, exactly?
I understand the point you're failing to make, but you're failing to make it. Step up your persuasion, possibly with evidential logic based reasoning.
Far more glaring is the 16GB flash size and the 2GB ram, in a world with 4GB ram and 32-64 as standard.
It's weird, they could have put out an 8 core 64 bit A53 or A57 based tablet like the Koreans and Chinese, if they're going for premium and slim, (with the fancy depth camera that seems to be the case), then make a premium product ffs! 64GB flash minimum, 4GB ram minimum, 64Bit Octacore ARM.
Who is going to want an Atom based tablet with only 4 cores, half the usual ram, a tiny amount of flash!
If they're going for budget why the super high-res screen? If they're going for premium why the crappy spec board?
cat | ./post-to-slashdot END_OF_RANT
Can the bootloader be unlocked? It seems that any non-nexus devices can only be rooted through running some sort of security exploit against the running OS, which only gets you control over that OS and doesn't let you easily load a new OS.
I'd like to see a device where not only the bootloader is unlocked, but it lets you set your own signing key, re-lock it, and then only boot images you sign. I know this will not be the case for mainstream devices, but I hope there will be a market for such devices among the geek crowd.
END_OF_RANT
Funnier!
My Dell Venue 8 Pro runs full Windows 8.1 on an x86 processor. But Dell also makes a lower end Venue 8 tablet that runs Android.
What's that thing called again?
Choice of OS is irrelevant to Dell's web checkout business model. Common x86_64 hardware enables the following:
(1) System RAM
(a) 1 GB [ ] default
(b) 2 GB [X] add $25
(c) 4 GB [ ] add $50
(d) 8 GB [ ] add $75
(2) OS
(a) Android [X]
(b) Windows 10 [ ] add $50
(3) Storage
(a) 4GB eMMC [ ] (Android only)
(b) 64GB SSD [X] add $50
(c) 128GB SSD [ ] add $100
(d) 256GB SSD [ ] add $150
I can't remember. It's made by Dell, but I already knew they made attractively priced but ultimately unsatisfying hardware, and unattractively priced but ultimately reasonable spec gaming hardware.
Who are you?
Forgiving? Way way beyond forgiving IMO.
Comes with KitKat but they "trust" will be updated at some point in the future.
McAffee nags you to register every time you turn it on but it's an OEM favorite so they're not surprised to see it.
Takes 2-3 seconds to transition landscape-portrait/portrait-landscape but they "hope" Dell will address this in an update
The real sense cameras are useless other than in best lighting conditions but they're not a gimmick
Middle of the road performance - At launch. In 6 months those slightly higher than the mean stats are going to be pushed even lower.
Through all that, they still give the device their recommendation
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
It's called the Dell Avenue 42 over 9000 mark III rev 4.14, second edition.
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I'd have thought geeks would love Sony's naming scheme. Maybe it's the way that their US website presents the information.
Japanese manufacturers tend to have quite nice model naming systems. They usually use a product-option-colour system, a bit like the major-minor-patch system for numbering software. They also come up with amazing sub-brands that tragically rarely make it to the west. Panasonic Doltz toothbrush anyone? Lam-Dash razor perhaps? How about a Hitachi Wooo TV?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Now *you* are participating in Dell's marketing. Whether you like or will remember the name yourself is irrelevant, I'm pointing out that the GGP is participating in spreading the name. Why is it so hard for people to understand more than one point about an issue?
Because you lump all buzz with good buzz. It's a pointless argument, mere noise, because the point of marketing is to get you to buy the darn thing, not sit somewhere and type about it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This insure you thumbs always cover part of the image. Unless it has handles, like the mil-spec tablets. I WANT MIL-SPEC, not breakable thinness, short battery life and thumbs covering the image!!!
Not just the sub-brands. My Zojirushi rice cooker is fantastic.
You can say, "oh no you dint" all you like, but you are literally part of the campaign. Which tickles me, because you think you're not subject to the same shit that's used on all of us.
Go ahead, keep denying it, this is a hoot!
You used its name, and you STILL don't get it!
Yowza!
The campaign, for what exactly?
You keep hooting, it's a good audible warning for the rest of us to stay clear.
"6 millimeters thick, or 0.24 inches and change." Sounds bendy?!
I continue to enjoy this proof that so many /.'ers think they are immune to the techniques employed by corporations. It. Is. ADORABLE!
I did notice. It's part of the funny.
But it's clear you can't admit you're just like the rest of us. I love twonking retards like you.
Oh, and... you don't know the mean of the word mythical. I'll bet there's a lot of words for which you don't know the meaning.
Stay dumb, bro.