Dell Venue Pro
BANGALORE: The Dell Venue feels great in the hand, has a very impressive build quality and a beautiful 4.1-inch AMOLED display which makes colours leap out of the screen.
Not only is the screen big, but it is also curved, lending to improved ergonomics, an interesting visual appeal, and a high level of screen sensitivity. The 4.1- inch screen size seemed perfect for browsing the web.
The curved Corning Gorilla Glass display is completely resistant to scratches though it seemed to be a magnet for fingerprints. The grooved finish on the back adds to build-quality, making the phone easy to hold.
Apart from the three navigation buttons on the front (Home, Menu, and Back), the Venue has volume and camera buttons on the right, and a lock/power button on the top, and a button on the left to put it into vibrate mode.
The pre-loaded Dell Stage is similar to HTC Sense with seven home screen panels, including Dell Home (clock, weather, and recent apps shortcuts), Email, Contacts (a photo speed dial screen with 12 of your favorite contacts), Social (Facebook and Twitter feed widget), Web, Gallery and Music.
These are all simply widgets so one can easily add or remove them. The Stage UI, though not as good as the Sense UI, does making organising content very easy and keeps the most recent content always in the front.
The Dell Venue comes with Swype pre-installed so you get a fantastic QWERTY keyboard experience on this device. Bundled along with the phone are a backup and restore app (for SMS, ringtones, bookmarks, apps, etc.), a sync utility to go with its Windows desktop suite (for multimedia and Outlook management), QuickOffice suite and TuneIn Radio app (though no FM radio). Like other Android 2.2 phones, the Dell Venue has Flash and live wallpaper support.
The 8MP camera was a bit of a disappointment with pictures taken in low-light situations (even with the flash on) coming out under-saturated. The Venue does not come with a front-facing camera which is very strange for a high-end phone. Thus one will not be able to make video calls with this phone.
The Venue, running Android 2.2 is a speedy device and one will easily notice the big step up in performance from 2.1. Despite having such a large display, the Venue does a good job in the battery life department. With heavy use, we were able to go a full day without needing a charge. With average use expect it to go a day and a half.
All in all, the Dell Venue is a solid phone that comes in nice package, as well as a form factor that is very appealing. If only Dell would tweak the camera the camera a bit and also get the 2.3 update out as soon as possible, this would be a great buy.