DellPad mini

Surprisingly slim with some booty grooves

I was pleasantly surprised by the weight of Dell’s Venue 8 Pro the first time I picked it up. At 9mm thick it’s not the thinnest tablet out there, and at 13.9 ounces it’s slightly heavier than my iPad mini Retina, but the weight is distributed well across the device and it’s comfortable to hold in one hand. It’s the usual black slab of plastic that you’ve come to expect of a tablet, with no real surprises in the looks department. The rear includes a rubberlike plastic that’s textured and grips well to your fingers, but the front of the device looks like any random Android-based tablet, with no indication it’s a Dell running a full copy of Windows 8.1. It’s not ugly as such, but it is very unassuming. While it occasionally picks up dust between its grooves at the rear, thankfully its matte finish keeps it from being a true fingerprint magnet. There’s no creaking when you try to bend the tablet or apply some pressure with your fingers, nor any movement around the 5-megapixel camera at the rear; the Venue 8 Pro is clearly built to withstand being tossed into a backpack daily.

Everywhere you look on the hardware, the Venue 8 Pro appears just like any other tablet. Around the right-hand side there’s a Micro USB port alongside a power button, volume rocker, and a flap to access the microSD port — having more than the included 32GB or 64GB of storage is key on a Windows device like this. The left-hand side is clear of any buttons, rather like the Nexus 7 and iPad mini Retina.

A loudspeaker you can hear in space

There's a loudspeaker on the bottom. When Dell says loud, it means loud: its audio is the loudest I’ve ever experienced from a device of this size. You really need to keep the volume level low to avoid distortion, though, and regardless of the volume level sound can be really crackly, especially when it’s left in standby mode and notification sounds play. (Microsoft had the same issue with its Surface RT initially, so Dell should be able to address this through a driver update.)

Next to the standard headphone jack on the top of the device, Dell’s added an innocuous-looking Windows key — part power button, part one-touch way to return to the Start screen. Most Windows devices have a capacitive button at the bottom of the display, so I’m not sure what Dell was thinking here, but thankfully Windows 8.1 supports swipe gestures so you don’t have to fiddle around with the button up top; pressing it so often can be awkward.