Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon in a min from pocket now calm and this is the software review of the dell venue this is like the dell venue pro but without a keyboard and of course it's running on android so let's take a look at what dell has done to the android interface here on the venue let's get to it now if you've ever used the dell streak which is another Android tablet / smartphone you know that they have something called the stage UI which sort of brings these widgets that sit on a stage they've done the same thing with the venue if you like widgets you're going to love this if you don't like widgets you're probably never going to use any of these fancy widgets so let's talk about the stage you I we're also going to go through some benchmark tests compare the speed of this device to the nexus s and do some other cool stuff so let's unlock the device here and zoom in a little bit and we're going to go through all these different stage widgets so what we have here is a relatively plain installation of android 2.2 with the exception of several different things that dell has done to spruce up the interface let's talk about it so we got the Android launcher down here the froyo launcher then we've got a variety of widgets and this is called the home widget quite simply chose you your six or actually nine if you do them at the right most recently used apps shows your local your location and the weather and the temperature if you tap on the temperature it's going to take you to accuweather com which is a little bit silly should take you into a dedicated weather application so this app is relatively useful it basically serves as your application launcher let's go to the side and see some other things that we have here this is the internet stage widget and from here we can add a variety of favorites so I've got pocket now here picasa yahoo or you can tap up here to the google search and you're taken into the standard Google Search application that you would get if you were to use just the standard Google widget in stock Android and of course we can tap on any of these that will launch the browser and bring up the web page in question and we're back home it keeps bringing you back home we're to swipe over here and actually going to go to the other side where the other widgets are this is the people widget quite simply it's just pulling from your Android starred contacts and as populating it with pictures here which is quite nice and so if you tap on any of these items it'll ask you you want to call this person text them you want to email them or view the contact so pretty handy to have here the trouble with all of these widgets really is that they take up the entire screen so again I said if you like widgets you're going to like this because you get to scroll around from screen screen the screen but if you like kind of a minimal look without all of these widgets you're probably going to take them off the screen and stick with program shortcuts or revert to launcher pro or ADW launcher or something like that to simplify things a little bit because this does tend to get a little bit slow when you add tons of widgets so over here is just a email widget which you can flip through kind of reminds me of an HTC Sense widget so it's pulling from my main email account here swiping to the right this is the social widget and you can filter out between Facebook and Twitter you can even update your status from here you can check off if you want to go to Facebook or Twitter or both but again I think some people are going to stick with the dedicated twitter app the dedicated facebook app but it's nice that they included this so in case you don't want to dive into the application you can use the home screen widget and there's also a couple that I i want to show you but first I'm gonna show you something down here if you tap and hold on the bottom you're going to actually flip through your widgets this is kind of a quick way to jump through your widgets now you get little icons if you're using one of the dell stage widgets but if you get to a home screen like the two on the left where I don't have a dull stage widget you get this standard little android kind of place holder thing so over here there's just a google voice widget let's swipe over here to the left to a blank screen so i can show you the other stage widgets so again you tap and hold and you get this new section here that says stage widgets you've seen contact you seen e-mail gallery is different so it's going to bring up pictures that you have loaded onto your device although I don't know where these are pulling from you don't get to kind of adjust the options for each widget you just what you see is what you get I'm not sure what this is it looks to be a little video talking about the stage you I here okay let's get out of that and you can jump right into the camera application by tapping on that let's delete that and go back into the stage widgets so we have home you've seen that you've also seen social and web let's see music so this is what you would use to organized your your albums you can pin certain albums to this screen or this widget and also you can have playlists arranged then so that is a look at the stage you I again if you like widgets you're going to love this if not you're probably going to revert to something else okay let's move on and talk about the on-screen keyboard as mentioned in the hardware review the dell venue and the venue pro have extremely sensitive screens which is great so let's make a new text message here and by the way i wanted to show you that when you go into the application tray the dell venue will organize it into screens instead of one scrollable list you can't turn off this fancy pants and animation you also should be able to flip up from the bottom i believe as you can see to sort of move through the widgets if you start your finger at the application launcher you're taken into this there aren't any settings that you can change here in this application launcher it's just two screens you can't make it scroll vertically so again let's go into text messages and make a new message and you can see what the on-screen keyboard looks like because it is different than what you get in stock android so here it is it's kind of got a little bit of a black shine to it so this is a test very good keyboard if you're using it from the appropriate angle of course with a good level of on-screen sensitivity of course you can change its keyboard to be swipe or swiftkey or any really other android keyboard that your heart desires this is just what they include right on the device so let's jump back and let's go into the settings talk about some of the stuff in there we're going to go back to about this is running android 2.2 we're going to run a benchmark on this in a second as you've probably seen it's pretty fast it's not the fastest and we're going to see that in the benchmark also want to show you something here in status as you can see we are getting HSPA which is the faster data speed that you can get on tmobile capable of in some cases 6 to 10 megabits per second possibly much more in the future so if t-mobile were to release this on their network they would call it a 4g phone because they like to associate hspa+ with 4g so just something to think about if you're thinking about getting this phone you can take advantage those speeds in the future no word on whether the dell venue is going to get android 2.3 we're going to say probably not but maybe we'll have to look into that okay so let's run quadrant and see how this device ranks compared to other devices we're going to run the full benchmark here so you don't have to sit through this I'm going to cut back in in a minute and go right to the results all right we're done here let's see what we get so they are the results they're not terribly impressive you can see that it ranked below a galaxy s far above a nexus one but nowhere near a nexus one running on froyo and of course it's not even close to the Nexus S which we're going to compare it to which is a notch above the nexus one here it it's obviously the fastest android phone out there one of them but we're a little bit slow there in day-to-day usage the venue feels snappy it doesn't feel extremely fast but definitely there's good performance there I'm going to guess if you were to remove this launcher and use something like launcher pro or ADW launcher have like one or two home screens instead of seven with very graphic intense widgets you may find your device to be a little bit faster there so before we get into a web speed comparison just want to jump into the applications and talk about anything that came on here that's not usual we have backup and restore which is a nero program which will allow you to back up the settings on your on your your phone here and pretty much everything else is the same we've got del sink which is a little bit different and again this is a licensed from from nero i'm going to go back the camera is 8 megapixels and we get the standard Android camera interface here we don't have a front facing camera which is really unfortunate let's see if we can change the resolution here I've got a lot of settings so here we go 8 megapixels HD 1080 that's an interesting resolution to see there let's switch it to video and see what the resolutions are for that be nice to see full there it is 720p video very nice to see certainly it's capable with 8 megapixel so you can take HD video here on the dell venue which is always nice to have if you're out and about me want to take some videos so now let's talk about web performance so we're going to compare this with the Nexus S running android 2.3 perhaps an unfair comparison because the Nexus S is one of the fastest benchmarking devices but just want to give you an idea of how this device compares alright so we've got the nexus s set up here at Google we've got no open tabs got pocket now over here hit the back button accidentally let's just jump right into google and we'll we're over the same Wi-Fi network so you're going to be able to see what that's like I've got to say that the screen on the dell venue looks brighter but the blacks the contrast on the on on the Nexus S there's just so much greater so let's make sure just double check that we're not running multiple windows running a lot glad we went to that screen so here we are on Google and so let's go to pocket now on both of these and see how fast they get there so we've got got it already entered there let's do it okay the nexus s was there faster let's see how they handle the graphic heavy desktop version Nexus S is blazing fast it's ripping through this they're stuck on the same area let's see who will be the winner here suspense is killing us all right nexus s 1 and the dell venue is kind of struggling a little bit to get that last element i think it's pretty clear which one is faster we're going to do a landscape of rotation speed test in a second whenever the Dell Venue finishes all right they finished finally or sort of I've actually got the plug-in settings probably a little bit different just want to double check real quick it should be on on demand so let's go to able plugins always on on demand that's probably why I'm going to refresh the page and give them another shot it's refreshed there we go of course we're loading the wrong version of the site so we'll test it out the permalink just to get the speed comparison as exact as possible stop it there and see how pinching and zooming is in terms of smoothness so a little bit choppy on both devices actually this is a very heavy website for a for smartphone so let's try to open this link at the exact same time now that they both have the same settings for plugins let's try boom same time good see which gets there first and by the way della has modded Android to be more blue as you can see the progress bar is blue the cellular reception bar is blue by the way the Nexus S finished first so a lot of little touches and you'd see that throughout the settings and other stock Android areas there so loading up a lot slower than the nexus s let's see how they fare in terms of screen rotation speed so we're gonna kind of move the camera back okay the dell dell venue was actually faster there don't think I got enough distance there so let's try again hmm one more time to try to give it enough lift here hmm so it looks like the dell venue is actually faster and screen rotation speed which is always nice so overall we like Dells attempt to bring forth the stage UI for their latest and greatest Android device again some people are going to remove this and try to get something that feels faster perhaps doesn't use as much RAM to squeeze out some more performance overall it's a fast device it doesn't keep up with the Nexus S but it's running an earlier version of Android that isn't as perfectly tuned as we would expect so overall the software on the dell venue is a great start and it feels great in terms of the hardware and the screen sensitivity and the on-screen keyboard so over overall a really good package well the full review on pocketnow.com coming up soon to talk about more benchmarks and battery life and all those kinds of things that you want to know about so be sure to check that out you like this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching