Dell Venue 7

Look and feel

This is a pretty slick-looking tablet. Its black plastic and rubber finish is definitely less premium than that of #Apple's iPad mini lineup, but at least you don't require a protective case. The first thing you'll notice is the bold concentric circle pattern on the back. It looks good and helps you grip the body even when using it with one hand - the only minor drawback is that particles of dust and lint tend to get trapped in the grooves.

#Android navigation buttons are all on-screen. The power button and headset socket are on top, with the Micro-USB port and volume buttons on the upper left. A fairly prominent speaker grille is on the bottom. The Micro-SIM and microSD card slots are hidden under a neat rubber flap on the right edge.

Specifications and software

#Dell has continued using Intel's Atom CPUs in its tablets, and the new Venue 7 is powered by an Atom Z3460, which is a dual-core, 64-bit processor running at speeds between 1.06GHz and 1.60GHz.

The screen still has a resolution of 800x1280, though part of it will almost always be occupied by a band for the soft navigation buttons. This isn't the sharpest screen around, but it's good enough for reading books, surfing the Web, playing games and watching videos on. The primary camera has a 5-megapixel sensor and no flash, while the one in front only has a 1-megapixel sensor.

There's 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage space. MicroSD cards of up to 64GB are supported. The Dell Venue 7 (2014) comes with Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0. 4G LTE is not supported on the bands used in India, so you're limited to 3G speeds. The battery is rated at 4,550mAh.

Performance

The Dell Venue 7 (2014) performed quite well in all our benchmarks and we noticed a massive leap in performance between last year's model and this one. The Quadrant score jumped from 7,698 to 10,338 and the AnTuTu score from 19,094 to 30,429 (though these scores aren't entirely comparable as AnTuTu has been updated since then). The frame rate in GFXBench improved from 13fps to a very solid 32fps, and 3DMark's Ice Storm Extreme rose from 3,643 to 8,935. SunSpider's score improved slightly from 986ms to 958.1ms. It seems that Intel's latest generation of Atom processors shows much greater improvement in the graphics subsystem than the CPU.