Like smartphones, tablets have evolved to the point of generic blandness — every tablet is a flat rectangular slate. Dell's new 10-inch Venue 10 7000 tablet, however, dares to be different.
The bigger brother to the 8-inch Venue 8 7000, the Venue 10 7000, has a 10.5-inch OLED display with a 2,560 x 1,600 (WQXGA) resolution. Unfortunately, the super slim bezels didn't make the move to the bigger tablet.
The "barrel edge" hinge is what makes the Venue 10 7000 stand out. This titanium cylinder eats into one side of the tablet and serves as a sizable grip for one-handed use, props the tablet up at a slant on a table, and houses the front-facing speakers.
It also securely latches the tablet into a keyboard accessory and allows it to be positioned in the "tent" and "stand" modes that many transformers are known for.
In my brief hands-on with the Venue 10 7000, Android 5.0.2 "Lollipop" was relatively zippy powered by its Intel Atom processor Z3580 (configurable up to 2.3GHz quad-core processor) and 2GB of RAM. The specs seemed capable of handling a couple of Chrome tabs without noticeable slowdown, although I'll need to stress-test the tablet to see how many it can handle as a mobile work machine.
The Venue 10 7000 has a 8-megapixel Intel RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera made up of three cameras on the back — the same depth camera on the Venue 8 7000. You'll find the same gimmicky shoot-first-readjust-focus and object-measuring features baked into the camera software. The front-facing camera is a 2-megapixel one; nothing spectacular.
The Venue 10 7000 comes in two storage models: 16GB and 32GB. The latter capacity is limited only to U.S. and Canada. For the media buff, there's a microSD card slot, which can take memory cards up to 512GB.
The speakers are tuned with Waves' Maxx Audio, just like on the company's smaller tablet, and they can get really, really loud — louder than on iPad. I don't know if I'd actually pump up my tablet's volume so high, but it's there if you need big sound and don't have a Bluetooth speaker around.
There's a 7,000 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery inside, which is good for up to seven hours. With the keyboard attachment, it'll get up to 15 hours.
The Venue 10 7000 will be available in May starting at $499 and throwing in a keyboard will push that price up to $629. Launching models will be Wi-Fi only, but Dell says a 4G LTE model is on the horizon.