Dell Venue 8

When longtime PC producers Dell decided to take their second plunge into the tablet market, the company came out with three budget-priced, smaller-sized devices at once, all looking and performing remarkably similar. So call the Dell Venue 8 the big brother of the Venue 7 – a big brother who aside from a few extra inches and ounces might be an identical twin.

Priced at about $30 more than the Venue 7, the Dell Venue 8 brings (as the name indicates) one extra inch of screen space. At 0.38” thickness, the no. 8 is in line with its fellow Dell tablets, but is above average – a bit of a disadvantage with a release date timed so closely to that of the Apple iPad Air.

The Venue 8 specs list, meanwhile, pretty much reads precisely identically to the 7’s, pluses and minuses alike. A ho-hum 16 GB is included in the basic model and a 32 GB edition is also available; either can be further supplemented with. Like the Dell tablets released alongside the Venue 8, this one is loaded with the Android 4.2 OS running very smoothly and quickly thanks to the 2.0 GHz Atom Z2560 CPU. Google Nexus-like performance on an 8” screen sounds great except again the ball is dropped when it comes to touchscreen responsiveness. Points removed here.

Ultimately, if you’re a believer in Dell technology (And why not? We’ve always felt the now defunct Dell Streaks were underrated and this second line is nice enough) here’s the Venue 8 in a nutshell: Decent all-around performance at a bargain price.