The Dell Venue 11 Pro 7000 Review

Camera

The Venue 11 Pro has two cameras. The front camera is a 2 MP unit and the rear camera is an 8 MP sensor. Neither are particularly impressive cameras unfortunately. Either would be ok for a video conference or something like that, but the camera quality is pretty low.

Here are some sample pictures.

Venue 11 Pro Front Camera Sample

Venue 11 Pro Rear Camera Sample

It seems to be the thing to do to include cameras in tablets. If you needed to do a video chat, they would suffice, but they are not very good for imaging.

Wi-Fi

The Venue 11 Pro comes with the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 wireless adapter, which is a 2x2:2 802.11ac model. We have seen it in quite a few devices since it was released late last year, superseding the 7260 model. It has a maximum connection speed of 866 Mbps.

The Venue 11 Pro did not have the best network performance. Even with the latest driver, the maximum connection speed that it would achieve was 780 Mbps, so right away there is a bit of an issue with the reception since it is not achieving the maximum speed of the adapter even with it being the only wireless device connected to the router. During use, the maximum transfer speed was only 420 Mbps though, which is an average result for this model, however it would not consistently deliver these speeds, with it sometimes dropping to the mid 200 Mbps range.

The tablet dock does allow for a wired connection, however the dock is only a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port.

Speakers

Dell has two speakers which, like their XPS 13, are mounted on the sides of the device. This gives a good bit of stereo separation as well as helps with directing sound towards your ears, as opposed to devices where the speakers fire towards the rear. Like many devices these days, they are tuned with Waves MaxxAudio.

The speakers were surprisingly loud, with a measured SPL of 76 dB (A Weighted) when playing music. Looking at the frequency response, there is actually reasonable response at the lower end of the graph which is always difficult for smaller speaker drivers to achieve. However there is a big dip around 4500 Hz which spoils the otherwise decent results.

Software

The Venue Pro 11 is of course a Windows based tablet, and as such is restricted somewhat when used as a tablet by the Windows Store, which, several years in, still does not have a fully fleshed out app store, but it has improved quite a bit. On the productivity and business side, Microsoft has made some headway here with partnerships with companies such as Dropbox and Salesforce.

On the tablet side only, there is certainly a gap with the lack of Microsoft Office, although that has been previewed as part of the Windows 10 update coming later this year. Buying the device today though means that you are missing out on the touch version.

OneNote is available as a touch version though, and with the inclusion of an active stylus, the Venue 11 Pro can be a formidable device for taking notes. I attempted to write something for a screenshot, but my handwriting is so poor that I felt it would be best to not embarrass myself. Instead I fired up Fresh Paint and did a bit of coloring with the stylus. It is very accurate and works well for this. People that have tablets that include a stylus seem to swear by them, and it seems to be for good reason.

I only colored some of this fish...

As an enterprise device, the Dell offers many of the features that an Information Technology department would look for, including Intel vPro on the 5Y71 version, and Dell Client Command Suite to streamline system deployment, monitoring, and updating.

The 10.8 inch display also does a good job with desktop use, especially when paired with some of the optional accessories like the stylus or keyboards. The Core M processor also performs better than any other tablet CPU which is fanless, which means that typical office tasks are no problem. Certainly the smaller display size can be an issue on desktop use compared to a much larger display, but those that are used to smaller notebooks will not find the Venue 11 Pro much more cramped. It would realy benefit here from a less wide aspect ratio though, as 16:9 is really not ideal for office use.