Dell Venue 11 review

Dell’s latest tablet is strictly business-focused. The Venue 11 Pro runs the full version of Windows 8.1 32-bit and includes a full-size USB port for maximum convenience. It even has a removable battery, which is a rare inclusion for any tablet but one that’ll come in handy for anyone who’ll be using regularly while mobile.

The rear of the Venue 11 Pro has a soft-touch plastic cover that comes off when you apply a bit of force. The Venue 11 Pro weighs a fairly hefty 760g. Add the optional keyboard dock and the weight increases to 1.4kg addition to your bag, which is close to the weight of many Ultrabooks.

Apart from the full-size USB3 port, The Venue 11 Pro also provides a Micro USB port for charging and a 3.5mm audio jack, and a Mini HDMI port, Kensington lock slot and microSD card slot on the right. You need a pin to access the microSD card slot, so it’s perhaps best to install a microSD in it for extra storage as it may prove fiddly to remove the card regularly.

The Venue 11 Pro has an 8-megapixel camera sensor on the rear, although there’s no flash and the photos it takes are average at best. Microsoft’s camera app is slow, with limited manual control, and the sensor can only capture dull, muted images that exhibit a lot of noise. However, the front-facing webcam is fine for videoconferencing.

It’s a shame the camera module is only mediocre because photos look great on the Venue 11 Pro’s 10.8in Full HD display. The tablet’s high peak brightness of 503cd/m2 means you can still enjoy the Venue 11 Pro outside in bright light, although its glossy finish makes light reflections a little troublesome. Even better, the Venue 11 Pro’s colour accuracy was superb, which made images and video look realistic and vibrant. Viewing angles were excellent, too.

The Venue 11 Pro uses a quad-core Intel Atom Z3770 processor, which runs 2.4GHz, and 2GB of RAM to power Windows. The Z3770 is a real improvement over last year’s Atom processor and is able to run Windows smoothly, although the Venue 11 Pro still struggled to complete our multimedia benchmarks. An overall score of 18 means the Venue 11 Pro’s performance is roughly on par with an entry-level laptop, and is significantly below the admittedly more expensive Surface Pro 2’s score of 47. Even so, we could use all our usual apps, including Chrome, Paint.Net and Microsoft Office, without experiencing slowdown.

Sadly, the Atom Z7330’s built-in graphics processor can’t cope with challenging 3D games, and the Venue 11 Pro produced a jerky 16fps overall in our Dirt Showdown benchmark, but older, simpler games were playable. You certainly won’t have a problem browsing the web, running MS Office applications or playing casual games.

The Venue 11 Pro’s Atom processor is, at least, energy efficient, which helped the Venue 11 Pro manage an impressive 10 hours 53 minutes in our light-use battery test. This means you’ll get a full day’s word processing or web browsing per charge.

Unlike 8in Windows tablets, such as the Toshiba Encore, we had no trouble working on the Windows Desktop with the Venue 11 Pro. We could see icons and text clearly because Dell has enabled 150 per cent text scaling by default. If you connect a USB keyboard, though, you’ll quickly bemoan the lack of a built-in kickstand.

If you use the optional docking station (£139, www.dell.co.uk), you can turn the Venue 11 Pro into something approximating a desktop PC. The dock has three USB3 ports, DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs, a 3.5mm headset jack and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The docking station conveniently holds the Venue 11 Pro in place.

You can also buy an optional keyboard dock (£160, www.dell.co.uk) for the Venue 11 Pro, but unfortunately Dell didn’t have a keyboard dock available for us to use in this review. However, it does look like a worthwhile purchase, as it has Chiclet keys, a small touchpad and an integrated battery. Dell claims the battery can extend the tablet’s battery life by up to 50 per cent. Of course, without testing the keyboard dock’s battery we won’t know how much longer you can expect the tablet to last with the keyboard dock attached.

By focusing on the business market with the Venue 11 Pro Dell has sensibly avoided any comparisons with Android, iOS and even Windows RT tablets. Instead, the Venue 11 Pro’s main rival is Microsoft’s own Surface Pro 2, although the Surface Pro 2 costs almost twice as much as the Venue 11 Pro.

If you fancy the Venue 11 Pro it might be a good idea to invest in the keyboard dock, as the touchscreen simply is best used for typing a quick email and web browsing rather than working on involved MS Office documents. Even so, for sheer flexibility, the Venue 11 Pro provides a good alternative to the Microsoft Surface Pro 2.