Dell Venue Pro review

Dell India has recently unveiled its Dell Venue and Dell Venue Pro for the Indian market. The Dell Venue Pro is a high-end Windows Phone 7 device that comes with stunning 4.1 inch WBGA AMOLED capacitive multitouch display, built-in Office Mobile and Xbox Live for mobile gaming experience.

Now, as the device is launched in India, we review it to see what all it has to offer and how does it compete with the other smartphone devices on the higher segment in the Indian market. So, let's find out is it really worth enough for your hard-earned money?

Well, the answer depends on your perspective about what all you presume from a smartphone device. However, there's nothing much difference you will find among the Windows Phone 7 devices as all are pretty much similar in their functionalities.

In fact, the smartphone makers do make minor tweaks time to time, upgrading software or hardware or just manipulating the specifications in the form of screen size, camera resolution, but in the end you almost get same set of devices with minor changes in different form or model names.

The user interface of the device is comprised of tiles that can lead you into hubs to aggregate similar content together.

More tiles contain content themselves – we particularly like links to Bing Map locations and to specific tunes. These shortcut buttons do make things easier for the users as you get what you want when in easier and faster ways.

Then there are Hubs, which are fixed in number and give away the fact that Microsoft isn’t quite sure whether Windows Phone 7 is for high-end business users or for everyday consumer folk.

So, you have a Games hub complete with Xbox LIVE avatar and links to games. Also there is an Office hub that is meant for corporate networks to use with SharePoint and which provides access to OneNote, Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Wait, there are plenty more hubs offered with the device. It has the Music, Videos hub and the People hub, the latter of which can tie in to Facebook, Outlook, Windows Live, and Google. However, all the hubs are very neat and tidy, and very inflexible. You’ll either like it or find it too constraining. But that’s Windows Phone 7 across all its incarnations.

On the flip side, similar to other Windows Phone 7 smartphones, the Dell Venue Pro offers no microSD card so you are stuck with the 8GB of internal storage only which the device provides at the time of purchase.

Then you are stuck to sync your contacts and diary as well. A common issue with Windows Phone 7 smartphones, there is no way to synchronise diary and contacts on the desktop. You have to do that job in the cloud using a service like Windows Live or Google.

The only major change you can notice on this device is on the hardware front. Dell has differentiated this model with other Windows Phone 7 devices on two aspects. First, there’s a huge screen. At 4.1 inches it is a little smaller than the screen on HTC HD 7 but it is nonetheless big by smartphone standards for sure.

<< Previous 1 2 Next>>