Dell’s new Venue tablet family isn’t just limited to low-cost Android tablets. There’s also a low-cost Windows tablet on the way.
It’s called the Dell Venue 8 Pro, and it’s an 8 inch tablet with an Intel Bay Trail processor, an optional wireless keyboard and an optional active stylus.
The Dell Venue 8 Pro is due to hit the streets October 18th for $300 and up. That’s the same day that Microsoft Windows 8.1 launches.
The Dell Venue 8 Pro packs an 8 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel IPS display, a 1.33 GHz Intel Atom Z3740D quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to 64GB of built-in storage, although the base model sports 32GB.
Dell’s tablet feature dual-band 2×2 MIMO 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and options for HSPA+ or 4G LTE connectivity. In a nod to enterprise customers, the tablet also features TPM security.
The Dell Venue 8 Pro has a micro USB port, microSD card slot, a 5MP rear camera, and 1.2MP front-facing camera. It has an 18 Whr battery. The tablet will be available in red or black.
It measures 8.5″ x 5.1″ x 0.35″ and weighs about 14 ounces.
Can you elaborate on the stylus, just bought Samsung Note 8.0 for its SPEN feature but really wish Windows has the same….
Does this device seriously not have some type of HDMI out? The only reason I can think of Dell doing that is too intentionally cripple it so people will use it as a secondary device instead of a laptop/desktop replacement. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did, other companies like Intel have been artificially crippling their CPU’s for years.
Dell is the kind of company that really plays inside baseball with their partners, thats the reason they went with old Clovertrail on their Android tablets instead of highend ARM chips. A big reason I prefer asian manufactures is that they have practically no allegiance to MS/Intel & will load their products with the latest & greatest.
Hmm… I wish I could buy Dell Venue 8 Pro with DOS (or *buntu) for … $200? Or for $250, but with true retina display. (on the front page it is said that Windows 8.1 is up for pre-order for $119).
In any case, pre-installed Win8 will be erased and replaced by slimmed down Win8.1 Embedded or even by Win7 Embedded, office is available for free with dreamspark… So why wasting time and money?
Mind that Win7 does not support the advance power management features that these mobile tablets now offer… So the battery life will be significantly worse!
Unfortunately, only Android and Windows 8 presently provide this support but hopefully other Linux distros will be updated in time…
While MS Office Home & Student 2013 is also free for all these mobile devices with 10.8″ and smaller screens… Your solution would be good for anything larger though…
Cost of bundled windows 8 is around $20 to $30 usd for these devices. $119 is retail price, not cost to the manufacturers.
Better than the surface rt
The missing HDMI out port is a deal breaker for me. This device will be locked to its 8″ screen and thus windows 8 will be almost unusable.
Everything else seems nice. Damn, soo close, but no cigar.
True, an odd omission, but if the WiFi is Miracast compatible then there could still be the option to wireless stream to a Miracast compatible display…
I’m hoping to see some OEMs put out 8″ or smaller Windows 8 devices with an optical mouse. An active digitizer just doesn’t cut it even on other OS’s like Android. Maybe even bring back the OQO slider form factor for 5″-6″ products.
An active digitizer is actually very useful, OS like Android just don’t provide native support and thus it’s more useful for OS like Windows, which generally needs it more anyway… but I would also like to see the Optical Mouse offered as well as either an alternative or extra as it covers different usage scenarios that will help make these devices more flexible and comfortable to use…
I have a Windows 8 tablet with an active digitizer. I definitely would rather have a mouse in the bezel even if I have to swipe constantly at it. I’m with you that it should be offered but I’m hoping the the mouse is the default and the active digitizer is an extra cost so I could skip on it (at least on 8″ and smaller devices).
Why mouse if the tablet are touchscreen? Am I in a twilight zone or something here?!!
Capacitive Touch Screens are by their nature not accurate, especially on small screens… So working with the desktop and trying to click a small icon, menu item, etc. is much harder if you only have a touch screen.
The behavior of a touch screen is also not the same as a mouse, and the desktop is optimized for mouse and keyboard usage. So things like click and grab/drag, right clicks, etc you can’t really do with just the touch screen!
It’s one of the reasons why traditional Windows has never worked well with mobile device designs and one of the reasons why MS is pushing Metro so hard as a more cross device usage UI…
Android have awesome stylus but its mainly made by Samsung and its Spen.
The S-Pen is Samsung’s adoption of the WACOM digitizer… the pens are even cross compatible!
But Android itself is not optimized for pen usage, which is why Samsung pushes the S-Pen software as to provide that support…
It would be nice to see 7-8″ inch device with optical trackpad (as it was on numerous devices, such as HTC Desire Z, Samsung i900 and so on) which emulate mouse pointer.
Or trackball. Or trackpoin, such as Thinkpad series has.
can the usb port be used to install Linux on it?
as a x86 eufi product i understand this should be possible…
What distro do you plan to use? Unless you always carry a keyboard and mouse accessory, it’d be hard to use. I can only think of Ubuntu Touch but I don’t think it’s stable enough even for casual use.
Well, there’s Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, KDE’s Plasma Active, E17 based distros like Bodi Linux should have a tablet UI layout mode (not really touch optimized but can work with it), and many distros offer at least touch screen support for at least some functionality with a touch screen.
Regardless, if you intend to do a lot of typing and actual work then you’ll still need a keyboard and mouse… Capacitive touch screen, especially on a small screen, is too inaccurate for doing much more than casual things most of the time…
I’ve seen Tizen (more comparable to Android than desktop Linux usage) and tried KDE’s Plasma. Not so great. Maybe the others are better for a touch screen without downgrading to a mobile OS usage scenario. Anyway, I’m hoping for an OQO slider type device so it won’t matter what OS I use.
opensuse with plasma active
Why would you put something so useless on a tablet?
are you an idiot?