dell venue 7840 ?

[you2]

Has anyone muck with one of these? Any clue how performance/battery life compares to the samsung tab s 8.4 ?
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For some reason I thought the atom was a lot slower but not sure (both cpu/gpu).

 

[p29]

I bought one last night. I was a bit wary, since Intel Atom doesn't have the best track record for being great hardware. Performance and battery life are decent for the 7840 though. I'm most worried about whether or not Dell will update it to Android 5 Lollipop. Battery drains about ~10%/hr while browsing using Chrome, and this is comparable to my Nexus 7 2013.

Benchmarks:

[FONT=Courier New]                    SunSpider 1.0.2   Kraken 1.1   3DMark 1.2*
Dell Venue 8 7840            654.6       5044.0        20125
Samsung Tab S 8.4           1082.3       8368.0        13450
Nexus 6                      833.1       6255.2        23236
[/FONT]

I used Chrome 39.
Benchmark for other devices from Anandtech reviews.
* 3DMark 1.2 Unlimited - Overall

Other observations of the device:

I don't think Dell reported the capacity of the battery, but CPU-Z says 5526mAh.

The Venue 7840 does not have NFC, which I have taken for granted. I had a habit of tapping my phone to the Nexus 7 to transfer content, and I found myself wondering why it wasn't working when I tried with the 7840. NFC is something I'll miss having.

No Qi charging, which I will also miss.

No Compass sensor.

The WiFi antenna seems to be near the front facing camera, so if you hold the tablet in portrait mode with your left hand, there is significant signal loss. This is an issue in my house, and it causes the tablet to lose connection when I'm furthest away (~50 feet, 2-3 walls).

The device will boot with the ART runtime, however Dell's Gallery app will not work, nor will Hearthstone.

The screen is stellar, with fantastically slim bezels. I'm a fan of OLED displays, and wish more manufacturers would use it.

The overall build quality is great, and the metal body doesn't flex at all. The bottom plastic part is a total fingerprint magnet though.

The much advertised 3d camera is terrible, producing very poor quality photos, especially since the placement of the cameras (bottom) attract fingerprints, which further degrades picture quality in an already poor camera. It's a neat concept, but not effective enough to be usable.

A bit random: While Android was updating, the update message was in Chinese.

I'll probably keep the 7840 because of how good the screen is, unless something gets announced within the Best Buy return period. If I end up keeping it, this will be an opportunity to either get burned or amazed by Dell software updates.

 

[bradly1101]

Battery drains about ~10%/hr while browsing using Chrome, and this is comparable to my Nexus 7 2013.

Did they fix the Chrome battery bug? I like mobile Firefox.

 

[lopri]

It looks like Intel's most competitive offering to date. The tablet rides on the top bin of 22nm Atom line-ups, and the raw processing power should be stronger than S800/801 class, clock-for-clock. Though there are many S80x revisions and recent ones (e.g. 2.7 GHz S805) may be more comparable.

However, Atom loses to Krait in GPU and ISP (Image Signal Processor, i.e. Camera) rather significantly. From what I read the PowerVR 6430 in Atom Z3580 is an enhanced version of A7's GPU (iPad Air), so it is not a weak GPU at all and I do not think the GPU will run out of steam during the tablet's lifespan. But still, it's probably only close to Adreno 330 (S800), which means Adreno 420 (S805) should beat it comfortably. That the tablet runs 2560x1600 is somewhat of a question mark. Most OEMs have chosen S805 for QHD so far.

On the ISP front, the comparison gets kind of ugly - Atom max 13 MPixels, S800 max 20 MPixels, S805 max 55 MPixels. But since we are talking about a tablet, camera is not the priority there.

Overall I think it is a very strong offering from Dell/Intel. Presumably the display is among the best on a tablet, and the CPU performance should be up there as well. All these in a 6 mm thick chassis, which is pretty impressive. I would like to take a personal look.

P.S. Is the tablet missing GPS?

 

[lopri]

I just realized that this this tablet and Nokia's N1 tablet have very similar internals. Outside, they are quite different. Dell Venue 7870 runs 2560x1600 (16:10) AMOLED, Nokia N1 runs 2048x1536 (4:3) IPS. Both aluminum unibody designs, and N1 adopted USB Type C, it seems. Its spec sheet also leaves out GPS. Weird.

 

[you2]

Well if they were all the same price it sounds like tab s is a bit slower (with identical screen); followed by zsony z3 and venue 8 ?
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I wonder which has the better battery life or speaker ?
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Surprise by the slow performance (benchmark) of the Tab S.
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Note that the Note 4 has the faster gpu mentioned above but it appears the venue 7840 did as well as the note 4 in graphics test ??

 

[p29]

P.S. Is the tablet missing GPS?

GPS works, and it fixes pretty fast, but I just noticed that it seems to be missing a compass sensor. It looks like many android apps will use the gyroscope sensor to show a fake compass. GPS Status also reports that there is no compass sensor.

The Note 4 uses the same SoC as the Nexus 6 (Snapdragon 805), and it has a slightly faster GPU than the Atom Z3580.

The Dell Venue 8 7840 effectively only has a mono speaker, so you'd definitely want headphones or external speakers, but I think this is an acceptable compromise for having such slim bezels on the top.

I've read some people who've criticized the bezel on the bottom, but where else would you put your hand? I think the bezel is fine, although more work could be done to improve the speaker grille.

Battery life still seems solid. I'm getting around 10hrs screen on time while browsing using Chrome, but I seriously miss having Qi charging. I'm going to look for a Qi charging receiver to see if that'll work.

 

[you2]

I guess one other negative is that it only has 2 GB of ram; a lot of the newer andriod devices have had 3 GB. I know this is a limit of the atom soc (no clue why intel limits them to 2GB).

 

[gmaster456]

It's got a fantastic screen. Price does seem a little on the high side for 2gb/16gb but not absurdly so.