Dell Venue 10 7000 review

Dell's usual game is computers and laptops, so it's not too surprising to see the company decided to stick with Intel to supply its tablets with brains. The Venue 10 7000 shares the same Intel Atom Z3580 processor as its smaller, 8-inch brother.

Given the two tablets also share the same WQXGA resolution, it's also not surprising to see the benchmark scores are inline with one another. The Venue 10 completed the Geekbench 3 multi-core benchmark test with 2,915 points, which is nearly identical to the Venue 8's 2,913-point result.

While Intel is king on the PC circuit, it just can't keep up with other players in the mobile space. The iPad Air 2, powered by Apple's custom (ARM-based) A8 processor, was able to achieve a much more impressive multi-core score of 4,507 points. The Nvidia K1 processor inside the Nexus 9 also crushes the Venue 10's Intel chipset with 3,492 points.

Despite these comparatively disappointing benchmark scores, this 10.5-inch tablet is a snappy little device. Apps run flawlessly whether I'm tabbing between 12 different websites in Chrome, reading the latest issue of Batman in the Kindle app or flicking through stories saved on Instapaper.

The onboard Imagination PowerVR G6430 graphics chip also helps the Venue 10 handle graphically intensive tasks, such as streaming a 4K video or playing a heated round of Hearthstone.

Mediocre!

Unfortunately, an insufficient 2GB of memory on tap kills multitasking on this tablet.

At any given time, roughly half of the tablet's RAM is eaten up by Android services running behind the scenes, including a preloaded copy of McAfee antivirus. Opening too many apps, like Google Docs and Chrome, at once quickly brings the tablet to its knees.

The cache on the Venue 10 (and most other Android tablets) feels almost non-existent, as the tablet hardly saves the state of the applications when switching from one to another. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal on a mobile device where you can really only do one thing at a time. In this way, Samsung has been much better adding the ability to have two app windows open at the same time on devices as small as the Galaxy Note 4.

Trying to write this review while constantly shifting back to Chrome to research our reviews of its competitors was frustrating to the point of being impossible. Alt- tabbing to Chrome with other apps open would consistently cause the browser to reload the entire website. Likewise, Google Docs would also refresh and bring me to the top of the document without fail.

Using Microsoft Word on Android proved to be an even more annoying experience, as the app would constantly crash, leaving me with three separate recovery versions of the same document within an hour. All the while, Google Music would also quit on its own in the background – just another hassle.

Luckily, the McAfee tools include a memory cleaner you can just tap to reclaim a portion of the used-up memory as well as exiting any long-unused apps. However, this is a small band-aid that does not fix the underlying problem that prevents the Venue 10 from being a reliable productivity machine.

Without a large cache to save the state of your documents or web browser, you could be left high and dry on a trip where Wi-Fi and hotspot connections are sparse. Just 2GB of RAM also seems like a paltry amount of memory, considering some tablets are starting to come with an additional gigabyte, and some recent smartphones, like the Asus ZenFone 2, come with 4GB of RAM.