Dell Venue 8 7840 review

Fancy camera aside, the Venue 8 7840 is an impressive tablet. In our tests, the tablet’s screen was capable of displaying 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, and as it’s an AMOLED model, blacks are truly black. The operating system feels like it’s just under your finger, and Android’s icons and text look sharp, clear and vibrant. The screen isn’t as bright as other AMOLED displays we’ve seen, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4’s, with a maximum brightness figure of 262cd/m2 compared to 297cd/m2 for the Samsung.

The tablet has a quad-core 2.33GHz Intel Atom Z3580 processor, which produced an impressive performance in our benchmarks. It managed a fast 864ms in the Sunspider JavaScript test, but we noticed some lag when scrolling around web pages and occasional stuttering animations when opening and closing apps.

The tablet managed a huge 20,415 in the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark, and could play Blizzard’s Heartstone smoothly, apart from some jerky intro animations. The tablet is currently running Android 4.4.4, but Dell has promised an imminent update to Android 5 Lollipop which should hopefully smooth out some of the performance bumps. In our light-use battery test we saw 14h 20m, which is up there with the best tablets we’ve seen such as the iPad Air 2.

Although we had some fun testing it, the Dell Venue 8 7840’s depth-sensing camera feels like more of a gimmick than a reason to buy. This isn’t a particular reason to worry, as the tablet itself is a desirable piece of kit, with lovely build quality and an excellent screen. However, it’s not the quickest tablet we’ve seen, and it has some serious competition from the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4. This isn’t as beautifully made as the Dell tablet, but has a brighter AMOLED screen with the same 2,560×1,600 resolution, and is currently just £250. There are also rumours that the Samsung tablet will get its update to Android Lollipop in April.

It may not be able to beat the Samsung competition for value, but if you want a tablet which you can really show off, the Dell Venue 8 7840 is a good choice. It wins a Recommended award. If it doesn’t quite fit your needs then check out our regularly-updated Best Tablets and Buying Guide.