KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Dell included Android KitKat 4.4.2 with the Venue 8 7840, though Dell have confirmed to us that Lollipop's arrival to the Venue 8 is imminent. As it is, we used the tablet with KitKat installed.
Like the Vodafone Smart Tab 4G, Dell have left KitKat mostly alone.
The included launcher is what we like to call ‘Google Now' lite – meaning it is for all intents and purposes the same as Google's own launcher, but lacks the actual ‘Google Now' feature. Dell left the home screens fairly empty, which is a plus – there are no nasty ‘smart weather' widgets taking up almost your entire screen.
As you would expect from Dell, there is a blue colour theme running throughout the OS, meaning the settings menu features white text on a blue background. This is very clean and simple, and does not differ much from the stock OS.
The notification panel has also been left alone – with the familiar 'tiled' quick settings dropping down on the right hand side, while any notifications drop down on the left.
So, we have more-or-less stock Android included with the Dell Venue 8. This is certainly a good thing, but we do feel Lollipop may better suit the Venue 8 – KitKat is getting slightly tired now, while Lollipop is fresh and vibrant. It is not fair to criticise Dell for using KitKat, we just feel that Lollipop may be more exciting to use.
Just a note about 16GB + SD card with KitKat: in my experience with the Galaxy Tab S 8.4, that’s quite useless. I guess it depends on use, but a 2.5GB game can only move 100MB to the SD card, and most apps can only access the SD card read-only. So even though I have a 64GB microSD card, it gets next to no use, while the device storage is always full. So this Dell may be able to use a 512GB card, but it’s pretty pointless.
By the way, it would be interesting to compare this to the Galaxy Tab S 8.4.