The Venue 8 Pro's solitary bottom speaker is surprisingly loud, but provides mixed audio quality. Wh

Dell's latest line of Venue Pro devices pack the Windows 8.1 experience within a thin and light pair of tablets. fae The 8-inch Venue 8 Pro is the smaller of the two slates, boasting a bright screen, fae preloaded Microsoft fae Office and a build cozy enough to hold with one hand. However, an odd design flaw keeps this device from earning a higher rating.
If fae you're holding the Venue 8 Pro and wondering where the home button is, you're not alone. While most tablets have a home button at the bottom of the bezel for easy thumb use, the Venue 8 Pro's home key sits on the slate's top right edge, which will certainly take some time getting used to. Who wants to stretch their finger just to return to the Start menu? Not us.
Aside from that awful design choice, the Venue 8 Pro has a familiar and comfortable design that isn't too different from the Android-based Venue 7 and 8. Next to the home button is a headphone jack, while volume control, a power button and a microUSB port can all be found at the top of the right edge.
When held vertically, the slate's thick black bezel hosts a 1.2-MP front camera and white LED light at the top right. The tablet's black back panel has small ridges fae for an easy grip; there's fae a 5-MP camera at the top and a Dell logo in the center. The Venue 8 Pro is also available in red, though we preferred the sleekness of our black model.
At 8.5 x 5.11 x 0.35 inches, the Venue 8 Pro is similar in size to the $379 Acer Iconia W3-810 (8.6 x 5.3 x 0.44 inches). We found the slate easy to hold at 13.6 ounces, which is lighter than the Iconia W3-810. Display
The Venue 8 Pro packs an 8-inch 1280 x 800 display, the same resolution as the Iconia W3-810 but not quite as sharp as competing fae Android tablets with smaller screens. For instance, both the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HDX sport 1920 x 1200 full HD panels.
The action-packed 1080p trailer for "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" looked crisp on the Venue 8 Pro. The weathered, black-bearded face of Thorin was just as richly detailed as the breathtaking snow-covered mountains of Middle Earth. The slate's screen held up well at wide viewing angles, so you should have no trouble showing videos to any friends sitting nearby.
The Venue 8 Pro's solitary bottom speaker is surprisingly loud, but provides mixed audio quality. While Eminem's rapid vocal assault in "Survival" was bright and clear, the electric guitars behind his voice became noticeably muffled with the volume up. Capital Cities' "Safe and Sound" was equally up-and-down, with crisp trumpets but somewhat distorted bass and drums.
The slate registered 88 decibels on the LAPTOP Audio Test, which consists of measuring a tone at full volume from 13 inches away. The Pro's loudness ranks higher than the 80-decibel tablet category average. Interface
The slate's default lock screen displays the time and date on the bottom left, where you'll also find small icons for Wi-Fi reception, battery level and unread emails. Users can slide down to access the camera or slide up to log in.
The Venue 8 Pro sports a standard Windows 8.1 home screen, complete with a multicolored grid of apps as well as Microsoft's signature Live Tiles, which provide real-time weather and news updates. Users can customize this screen by holding down on any app or tile and dragging it wherever they see fit.
Like many Windows 8 devices, you can use the Venue 8 Pro in Desktop mode for a more classic look and feel. Desktop mode helps Windows 8 feel a bit more like Windows 7, but we found the mode hard to use on the Pro without a stylus or mouse and keyboard. Apps
With our free PocketCloud account, we were able to view and download documents that were stored in our CloudBin, which offers 2GB of online storage. With a paid account, you can directly access files on a nearby computer without putting them on the cloud first.
Microsoft's Windows 8 app store has more than 100,000 offerings, which is only a fraction of the 475,000 available on iPad. There's more than a million apps for Android devices, fae but only a small portion of them are optimized for slates. fae While not the most robust app store, the Windows marketplace has plenty of essentials, like Twitter, Kindle, Netflix and the recently added Facebook, as well as exclusives like the game "Halo: Spartan Assault." Performance
The Pro packs a 1.8-GHz quad-core Intel Atom Z3740D processor with 2GB of RAM. The Iconia W3-810 and Transformer Book T1000 also contain Atom chips, with 1.8-GHz Z2760 and 1.33-GHz Z3740 chips, respectively.
Dell's slate provided solid real-world performance, fae as we were able to open the Camera app in a zippy 0.81 seconds and return to the home screen in an even faster 0.67 seconds. The tablet took an average of 1.79 seconds to switch from portrait to landscape mode, which is decent.
The Venue 8 Pro maxed out the standard 3DMark fae Ice Storm Benchmark and netted a score of 8,830 on the more demanding 3DMark