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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."
0.1 mm thinner than the competing models? Seriously? Is it even noticeable without a precision caliber?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
But will it bend ?
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.
That's the reason fashion runways are getting shorter every year.
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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!
That's why you always aim for the belt buckle.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
Just like the MHz/GHz war gave us the Pentium 4 focusing on one trait (even if it's mostly for marketing) at the expense of all others leads to a product that is less than optimal. Keep the thickness as low with the internals as possible, but for the love of god slap a manly battery onto it. Make a tablet that can run without being recharged for a week. Even if that leads to a tablet that's a a few mm thicker.
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.
I wouldn't mind having a phone as thin and light as a credit card. Then it would feel like a... credit card, which you know, feels fine in my hand.
Until you sit on it, forget it's there and run it through the was, or leave it on a pile of paper on your desk that later gets shredded...
Funnily enough similar arguments were made against VLSI microprocessors in the days of mainframes. What if I left my computer in my pants pocket and it got washed?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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
Don't worry about that. The "unibodies" of MacBooks (both Pro and Air) are CNC machined out of solid billets of aluminum. They are quite robust, despite their thickness.
Where I complain about excessive thinness is in cellphones. I wish Apple would stop making iPhones thinner, and just use any extra space for the battery.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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.
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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