Dig out a piece of paper and a pencil and draw a generic tablet. It doesn't need to be any particular tablet, just imagine what you'd see if you walked into a Best Buy and started browsing.

Chances are, you drew a rectangle shape with a screen and symmetrical bezels all the way around it, and that's exactly what you get from most tablets. Smartphones and tablets tend to be dominated by their screens, and while OEMs can do a certain amount to give their tablets a unique feel, most of them look the same when you boil the device down to its most basic design elements.

The most interesting thing about Dell's Venue 8 7000 (or 7840, whatever it is you want to call it) is that it doesn't follow this design playbook. Instead of using conventional bezels, Dell's newest Android tablet has an 8.4-inch screen that extends nearly to the edges on three sides, with a larger "chin" at the bottom to serve as a handle and to house the speaker, webcam, and other components. If it resembles anything, it's Sharp's Aquos Crystal phones—both buck smartphone and tablet design conventions in a similar way.

When we picked up the Venue, we were primarily interested in seeing how its unique design worked for day-to-day use. We've also run it through our standard battery of tests—there's no point in dropping $400 on something that looks cool if the battery life and performance aren't there. Are the insides as pretty as the outside, and how does it stack up to other tablets in the same price range?

Specs at a glance: Dell Venue 8 7840 Screen 2560×1600 8.4" (359 PPI) OLED OS Android 4.4.4 KitKat CPU 2.33GHz quad-core Intel Atom Z3580 RAM 2GB GPU Imagination PowerVR G6430 Storage 16GB (expandable via microSD by up to 512GB, though the largest size currently available is 128GB) Networking 433Mbps 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, optional Intel LTE coming in May Ports Micro-USB, headphone Camera 8MP rear camera with RealSense, 2MP front camera Size 8.50" x 4.88" x 0.24" (215.8 x 124.4 x 6mm) Weight 0.67 lbs (305 g) Battery 5900 mAh (non-removable) Starting price $399

Look and feel

We'll get to the other stuff, but the Venue's chin pretty much defines this tablet. Hate the chin, hate the Venue. It's got its upsides and downsides, but in any case you have to retrain yourself and unlearn some habits that more conventional tablets have taught you.

For example, you can pick up a regular Android or iOS tablet without having to worry so much about the orientation; the software will automatically rotate everything to be right-side-up. Standard symmetrical bezels mean that the tablet will feel the same no matter which way you're holding it. Especially on Android tablets that use onscreen navigation buttons, it truly makes no difference what way you're holding it.

The time flexible orientation matters most is when you've got headphones or a micro USB cable plugged into the tablet while trying to use it. Say you're reading in bed and listening to some background music or holding the tablet while watching a video—it's nice to be able to rotate the headphone jack so it isn't poking into your chest or in the way of your hand.

The Venue's software will rotate just fine, but the razor-thin bezels on the top and sides mean that there's only one way to hold this thing: from the bottom, where the headphone jack and micro USB port also are. If you're right-handed and gripping the tablet in landscape mode, the headphone jack is right where your palm is. You've got to hold it with your left hand to avoid it.

If you decide to unplug your headphones and listen to the front-facing speaker instead, things won't sound too bad. The speaker puts out a lot of sound, though like most tablet speakers it's light on the bass and it distorts just a bit at higher volumes. Unfortunately, its positioning across the chin means that it's easy to block with your hand.

The thin bezels that the chin enables can also be finicky. Unlike the iPad Airs and Minis, the Venue (and most Android tablets, really) doesn't have any kind of thumb rejection that helps it ignore accidental taps. To avoid this erroneous input, you need to hold the tablet by its chin or by (very carefully) palming it.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Don't let those complaints give you the wrong idea—there's some really great stuff about the chin, too. It gives your entire thumb a place to sit, so you can grip the tablet tightly between your thumb and fingers without worrying about dropping it. The thinner bezels on the other three sides help reduce the size and weight of the tablet, so the Venue is incredibly thin and light. It has quickly become one of my favorite tablets to use with one hand. Once you get used to holding it from the bottom instead of from the sides (or wherever else you hold your current phone or tablet), it's pretty comfortable.

The Nexus tablets are generally the standard by which other Android tablets are judged, and when compared to either the Nexus 9 or the 2013 Nexus 7, the Venue has a decidedly high-end, premium feel. Its back is mostly aluminum, with a glass cutout for the rear-facing camera and glass backing where the chin is. The back is a bit logo-y—there's a Dell logo, an Intel Inside logo, and the typical FCC markings—but at least they're fairly subtle.

While most tablets have a gradual curve to them, the Venue is all hard edges. The top corners of the tablet and the seam between the back and the sides are all hard edges, and only the bottom corners are rounded at all. We didn't think this made the tablet uncomfortable to hold whether we were palming it or holding it by its chin, but it's another point of departure from conventional design.

Compared to the tablet it's housed in, the 8.4-inch 2560×1600 OLED screen is less unique. It looks great, though—maximum brightness is a bit low at 231 nits, but OLED gives you solid contrast that makes it ideal for movie watching or reading in the dark (though colors look a bit over saturated, business as usual for this screen technology).

359 PPI is higher than most tablets (the Retina iPad Minis are 326, the Nexus 9 is 281, the Shield tablet is 283), so text and images are nice and sharp. This also helps negate any adverse effects of the OLED subpixel arrangement; those are invisible to the eye. It's a step up in quality from the screen in the also-$399 Nexus 9, which is a decent but unexceptional IPS LCD panel with some backlight bleed around the edges.

Oh yeah, there's a 3D camera

It doesn't get as much attention as its new CPUs, but for the last year or so Intel has quietly been pushing an initiative it calls "RealSense." The name doesn't refer to any one component in particular, rather it's a collection of hardware and software that collectively wants to make it easier to interact with your devices via gestures and speech.

The RealSense 3D camera hardware that's beginning to find its way into computers and tablets is primarily used as a depth sensor. On PCs with front-facing cameras, it will apparently enable gesture-based controls that will let you interact with things on the screen without actually touching the screen (Intel boasts that it supports finger-level tracking).

On mobile devices, it's more like the dual-camera setup that shipped with the HTC One M8. The Venue's three rear cameras can take a picture that can then be manipulated after-the-fact to add fake bokeh to your shots or to apply different filters to different parts of the image (making a background black-and-white, for example, while the foreground remains in color).

The RealSense implementation of these features is more flexible than HTC's implementation. The Dell Gallery app you need in order to manipulate RealSense-enabled pictures will let you adjust the distance at which it starts applying its effects (so you could start blurring objects 20 feet back, rather than 10 feet). A similar feature that allows you to measure the distance between objects in a picture is apparently coming in another software update.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham



Andrew Cunningham

Though the technology in the Venue is more advanced than HTC's implementation, the pitfalls are mostly the same. The software isn't always good at totally isolating subjects from their backgrounds—usually this is only visible around the edges of subjects. Cranking the faux-depth-of-field all the way up definitely exposes some edge detection problems. Other times, larger parts of subjects in the foreground blended into the "background" layer anyway. Dell's tutorial says that "the best depth accuracy is between three to 16 feet," and the RealSense camera becomes less effective if you stray too far from those recommendations.

It probably doesn't help matters that the Venue's 8MP rear camera is, well, a tablet camera. It's there, but it's pretty perfunctory. It produces sort of washed-out looking shots indoors, and pictures get noisy fast as the light gets dimmer. Turning on the other two cameras used for RealSense only seems to compound the problem. We'd be curious to see the kinds of shots RealSense could take if it were attached to a premium smartphone camera instead.

Intel's RealSense 3D camera, as demonstrated at CES 2014.

Finally, there's that chin again. All three of the rear-facing cameras are positioned on the lower-third of the tablet, and the primary camera is actually on the back of the chin. You know, the chin you're supposed to be holding the tablet by. It's awkward to hold the tablet steady without blocking one or more of the rear cameras or accidentally touching the screen.

Same goes for the 2MP webcam, which is mounted in the chin instead of above the screen (as is common). The orientation isn't super-flattering if you're holding the tablet by the chin, and whoever you're chatting with is going to end up looking up your nose. It's slightly better if you're holding the tablet in landscape mode or (delicately) by the top, but even then it's a bit strange to have the camera off-center. You may or may not care about this, depending on your video chatting habits (I don't do it much, and almost never on my phones or tablets), but it's probably the weirdest thing about the chin.