Dell Venue Pro Review

just when you thought it was safe to assume you’d seen the tail end of Windows Phone 7 handsets for the time being, along comes a late entrant in the shape of the Dell Venue Pro.
Now, the Venue Pro was announced way back last year along with all the others, but it never actually broke cover. After a few false starts, though, it is here. So, was it worth the wait?
The answer to that question rather depends on what you want from a smartphone. Windows Phone 7 is pretty much the same in every handset.
Oh, manufacturers add a tweak here and there, popping some its own software in or fiddling with things like screen size, but basically what you get in one handset is what you get in the next.
That means a very samey looking user interface comprised of tiles that can lead you into hubs that collect similar content together.
More tiles contain content themselves – we particularly like links to Bing Map locations and to specific tunes. These shortcuts make getting to what you want when you want it really fast and easy.
Hubs 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, there’s a Games hub complete with Xbox LIVE avatar and links to games. And there’s an Office hub that those who are catered for by corporate networks can use with SharePoint and which provides access to OneNote, Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
Then there’s the Music and Videos hub, and the People hub, the latter of which can tie in to Facebook, Outlook, Windows Live, and Google. It is all very neat and tidy, and all very inflexible. You’ll either like it or find it too constraining. But that’s Windows Phone 7 across all its incarnations.
Like other Windows Phone 7 smartphones the Dell Venue Pro has no microSD card so you are stuck with the 8GB of internal storage that is provided.
And also like other 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.
What Dell has done to make the Venue Pro different from the rest is all about hardware and there are two aspects to it. First, there’s a huge screen. At 4.1 inches it is a little smaller than the screen on HTC’s HD 7 but it is big by smartphone standards nonetheless.
With 800 x 480 pixels on offer the screen delivers plenty of detail, and it is sharp and bright. Viewing angles are good though not great, and overall we’re pretty happy with what we see.
The screen is capacitive, and pinch to zoom works really well. The 1GHz processor doesn’t struggle rendering web pages or playing video, so all’s well in the visuals department.
In addition, Dell has added a slide out keyboard. Now, we’ve already seen one of these coupled with Windows Phone 7 in the HTC 7 Pro. But that had a keyboard which slides out of the long edge, and here the keyboard slides from the bottom short edge, as on the Palm Pre 2 and BlackBerry Torch.
Here’s where we start to wonder if Dell has done the right thing. The on screen keyboards work well in tall and wide modes.
The screen is large enough that even big hands can work well with them, and Microsoft has engineered the keyboards so that they second-guess possible next keys, momentarily making their ‘hot zones’ that bit larger than the norm. This assists accuracy.
The slide out keyboard, on the other hand, is a bit cramped. Two-fingered texting is acceptably fast but we can go at the same speed using the on screen options. There’s no separate number row either.
And to accommodate what is at best an average keyboard Dell has had to make the Venue Pro heavy at 192.78g. It is top heavy too – and you notice that when holding it in two hands to use the physical keyboard.
We’re just not convinced of the worth of this particular slide out Qwerty number and if we had to choose one physical keyboard we would probably opt for HTC’s wider variant on the HD 7. Though then, of course, we’d miss out on the large screen.