Venue 8 Pro looks interesting to me. I'd love a $300 tablet that can run real Zbrush and real Photoshop with an active stylus. Would love for you guys to do a review and see what runs well on that Atom chip.
The Venue 8 Pro is super interesting, but it's not going to be able to run Photoshop properly with an Atom processor. What you are looking for is in fact the Surface Pro 2...which isn't even close to $300.
I'm interested because it's extremely portable, should make a great media consumption, web browsing and ebook reading device, plus it can double as a SNES/N64/Playstation/Mega Drive emulator.
It'll be able to run Photoshop - maybe not as well as a beefier Surface Pro 2, but it will run. Bay Trail's performance is likely going to be better than many full PCs that aren't that old. The 2GB RAM is likely going to hold it back more than the processor. I'm excited to see a review on this it looks like a great tablet for the money!
I've got a Surface Pro and I'd adjudge it the bear minimum I'd be willing to live with to run Photoshop. Performance in photoshop is fluid and feels fast, but I've noticed even with 1-2 year old laptops the experience starts to feel a little ugly.
I am pretty finicky though, so I suppose it's conceivable that some people could live with it, after all, people bought netbooks, despite every second using one feeling like you were having every part of your body cheese grated.
Definitely interested in the Venue 8 Pro as well at $300! Been waiting for a full Windows 8 x86 tablet in the $300-$500 range, MS seems intent on keeping Surface Pro in the $900+ range and previous efforts with Atom have been failures (Acer Iconia).
This looks to be the solution I've been waiting for to get a little more functionality than what Android tablets and iPads currently offer.
The Venue 8 Pro and the Venue 11 Pro feature a Synaptics digitizer (not Wacom, not N-Trig). They are a new player to the stylus market so there may be software compatibility issues like those seen with N-Trig tablets due to the lack of Wintab drivers.
grrr I wish I could delete my post above, sorry Jarred I was looking at Venue 8 and was thinking that you mean 8 Pro. my bad :( pls ignore my comment above
"The two Pro models run Windows 8.1 with Intel Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail) processors, while the Venue 7 and 8 will run Android 4.2.2 and will also use Intel Atom SoCs."
Jarred specifically states that the Pro models use Clover Trail, when it's actually Bay Trail. Your reaction was a little overboard, though. It was a simple mistake.
I thought I fixed it and still had the wrong parts as well. Oops. It's finally (completely) correct now. Hooray for apparently having two completely different Venue Pro 11 models, one with Bay Trail and one with Haswell!
Man, they have even DIFFERENT Haswells in there, yay! They have low end Pentium Haswell, they have higher end i3, then i5 too. This is unbelievable, I'm back at super configurable/flexible PC days with this Dell tablet hardware, nice to see Dell getting back to its roots!
The Pentium variant is interesting. If it's substantially cheaper than the Core-i3 version, anyway. I don't need full Core-i5 level performance on my tablet, but I'm rather disappointed with Bay Trail's GPU (not that it's surprising, though) and since Temash/Kabini tablets don't exist, I'm wondering if the Pentium's iGPU is significantly better.
Totally depends on the tablet. My Samsung XE700T1C (which has a fan though, not sure about these) can sustain 1GHz GPU clock and 2.4GHz CPU clock for at least 60 minutes (which is how long I played Rogue Legacy in window mode and kept an eye on Intel XTU graphs). :)
These do look interesting. It's too bad if they are going to handicap bay trail with 2GB limit though. I'd be quite interested to see how it'd perform with 4GB ram. What really make these interesting to me is the dock. I read someplace else it will be $99 and dual monitor capable. Will be very curious to see these anyway. Hope Anandtech does a review of a couple configurations. That's more than I've said about a Dell product in several years.
I too am a little worried about the RAM, especially since paging to eMMC would likely be brutal. I'll end up picking up one of these Bay Trail Win 8.1 tablets anyway. Even 2GB will be sufficient to make this more useful than my Nexus 7.
I was really interested in getting an 8" baytrail tablet but now I've read about the 11" Venue Pro, I think that's the one to get...
Having a much faster and larger SSD over eMMC is a big deal in my book. Then there're more ports, ac wifi, proper laptop dock with track pad and more battery (16hrs is it?!) and although 1280 would have been fine, I wouldn't complain about getting 1920 instead. Only downer is that I assume the 8" will come with full MS Office but the 11" won't. Not too big an issue though. Money no issue I'd want the 8" as well but as it is, the 11" makes more sense (for me).
Very nice! I'm going to be picking up a windows tab, now I just have to chose which one. I love the Venue 11 but I think I like Surface 2 Pro size better. The Venue 8 looks like a winner real genuine Windows 8 tablet for $300. Access to real apps and the PC isn't overrun by cash shops or micro transactions.
Does anyone know how much free space a 32GB tablet will have after a full Windows install? Seems likely to be... not a lot. At least there's a 64GB version.
Moving up to 4GB (dual channel ffs) RAM and a 1920x1200 screen would probably have me sold on the Venue 8 Pro--I think that's the sort of thing Microsoft needs to get people to be willing to live in Metro-land (what's the official name again?). Slapping touchscreens into traditional laptops doesn't suddenly make touch a better interface than a keyboard and mouse (let's be honest, it isn't and probably never will be), but at 8", touch is much more compelling.
I believe Windows RT takes 16GB more or less, which is why 32GB is the minimum. Of course, Windows applications tend to be larger than most tablet apps, though, so having only 16GB free could be a problem -- and for eMMC, you'd want at least 20% free as well, which means you need to leave 6.4GB of your 32GB free, leaving you with about 9GB of space you can use. I'm not sure but I think the full Windows 8.1 actually requires even more space, and with the swapfile it would definitely be more like 20-24GB just for Windows. :-|
God, I didn't even think about the swapfile. If Windows+swapfile(+Office?) actually takes up 24GiB, that's already more than 80% of the total space, meaning literally anything you put on the main eMMC will just tank performance, and even if it's "only" 20GiB, you're looking at ~3.5GB of usable space. Or are you using decimal prefixes throughout? I guess that would make the best-case estimate at around 6GB of free space. Still... I guess having an SD card to backup the eMMC is sort of a parallel to having a small boot SSD and magnetic storage to back it up? Or you could just stab yourself in the eye with a rusty nail and it'd probably be less painful.
I stand by my comments about the form factor but 64GB of eMMC should really be the minimum.
It really should, once temp files run amok and you install a few patches and additional programs you'd be at 32GB easily... And performance will tank, and the average user won't know he shouldn't fill the drive to capacity.
I am glad that Dell got all the checkboxes checked (1080p, $500, active digitizer, bay trail, battery keyboard) and more (touch cover, swapable battery)
It's been reported elsewhere (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/hands-on-de... that the Venue 11 pro will not only have a batteryless 'type cover'-like keyboard, but also a hinged keyboard 'dock' with an expanded battery.
How much of an IPC lead does haswell have over bay trail? Obviously fairly significant, but how would a dual core 1.2ghz Pentium compare to the bay trail at 2.4? I'm looking to jointly (with my dad) buy my sister a PC for her high school years, and we are looking at this and the surface two on our shortlist. Bay trail does sound like something that should be fast enough for web browsing and things like that yes?
The Pentium would be faster I'm almost sure, but probably not by a huge margin. I'd guess maybe 25% faster for the CPU, and the GPU might be more like 50-75% faster. We'll have to see if we can get one of the Pentium systems for testing, though, as until then we're basically just guessing.
The Venue 8 seems to fit everything I wanted from my iPad Mini but could not have. I love that it can run desktop level software without the confines of an App Store.
My question though, how well would the Bay Trail processor work with older games? I would love to play something like Half-Life 2 on this, would the hardware be sufficient for something like that?
Thanks for the feedback. I would expect that most games would have to run at a lower quality which would be fine in my eyes. I've been out of the PC gaming scene for a while and really like the older games.
I am getting Surface 2, but I am really interested to know why people so much appreciate the x86 compatibility on a 8" device. Old programs can be installed but can't properly run on a low-end processor. It would be a frustrating experience even if the processor were fast enough.
While I tend to agree that desktop software isn't terribly interesting in an 8" form factor, the pen should make interacting with the desktop a little more bearable.
Also there's the fact that people can run their library of Steam and other legacy games and emulators (obviously only the ones that aren't very demanding, of course).
Windows 8.1 huh? That's too bad since Windows 8 is completely and entirely unusable.
The more bad decisions Microsoft makes, and makes consistently, the more I think there REALLY needs to be a solid alternative OS. Probably something Linux based, but in order for corporations to even consider using it the OS would have to be able to be administered through AD. At least for the time being. Then there'd have to be a heavy push by every tech company to support the new OS and tons of people writing drivers for it.
"Completely and entirely unusable"? Hyperbole much? You might not like Metro, but it's perfectly usable, and there's absolutely no functionality that you lose versus Win7 (minus the Start Menu, of course). You actually gain functionality even if you entirely bypass the Metro interface (improved task manager, Storage Spaces, etc.).
BOOO fail, Intel Atom Z3740D single channel SoC, that consumes more power than the non-D, in the Venue 8 Pro. Wont be getting one of those. No way José.
The Venue 8 Pro looks tasty. I'm just not sure why I would want it over an Android tablet. Only usage cases that I can think of at the moment is for Excel on-the-go and running apps like MPC-HC.
The 8 pro looks great but I need to know.... How will football manager perform on it, I love the idea of a portable PC but no good if football manager don't run well lol
It's about time we get tablets with 32GB storage as standard. Now the Android manufacturers need to follow suit. No more 8GB and 16GB tablets. It's 2013, we should be far ahead of those constraints.
I'm very interested in those Dell Android tablets. The specs are good, the prices are great, it looks like Dell has some winners. So now I'm torn between those Dell tablets, a Kindle Fire HDX, or a Nexus 7...
On a full Windows 8.1 (not RT) it is over 20 GB just for Windows and another 4+GB for Office Home and Student so you have less than 8 GB left and you need to leave at least 20% free (6 GB) to make sure eMMC performance doesn't tank - that only leaves 2 GB for other apps. On Android (depending on the manufacturer bloatware (skins/enhancements) 16 GB tablet you will have anywhere from 9-12 GB free and I think on iOS your 16 GB tablets are fairly close to that or better. Even with micro SD expansion the lowest practical minimum for full Windows 8.1 tablet installs is really 64 GB or you are going to seriously hamstring yourself performance wise.
Noob question, but would it be possible to purchase the Venue 8 (android version) and put windows 8.1 on it. They are using the same processor, but the android version is much cheaper....
I just got the venue 7 yesterday. I haven't had much time to play with, but the display color do seem a bit "muted." And there is only one speaker (mono) rather than stereo, which isn't a big deal.
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Sttm - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Venue 8 Pro looks interesting to me. I'd love a $300 tablet that can run real Zbrush and real Photoshop with an active stylus. Would love for you guys to do a review and see what runs well on that Atom chip.althaz - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The Venue 8 Pro is super interesting, but it's not going to be able to run Photoshop properly with an Atom processor. What you are looking for is in fact the Surface Pro 2...which isn't even close to $300.I'm interested because it's extremely portable, should make a great media consumption, web browsing and ebook reading device, plus it can double as a SNES/N64/Playstation/Mega Drive emulator.
Braumin - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
It'll be able to run Photoshop - maybe not as well as a beefier Surface Pro 2, but it will run. Bay Trail's performance is likely going to be better than many full PCs that aren't that old. The 2GB RAM is likely going to hold it back more than the processor. I'm excited to see a review on this it looks like a great tablet for the money!althaz - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I've got a Surface Pro and I'd adjudge it the bear minimum I'd be willing to live with to run Photoshop. Performance in photoshop is fluid and feels fast, but I've noticed even with 1-2 year old laptops the experience starts to feel a little ugly.I am pretty finicky though, so I suppose it's conceivable that some people could live with it, after all, people bought netbooks, despite every second using one feeling like you were having every part of your body cheese grated.
chizow - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Definitely interested in the Venue 8 Pro as well at $300! Been waiting for a full Windows 8 x86 tablet in the $300-$500 range, MS seems intent on keeping Surface Pro in the $900+ range and previous efforts with Atom have been failures (Acer Iconia).This looks to be the solution I've been waiting for to get a little more functionality than what Android tablets and iPads currently offer.
bleh0 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Dell Venue 8 Pro or the Asus TF100?NLPsajeeth - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The Venue 8 Pro and the Venue 11 Pro feature a Synaptics digitizer (not Wacom, not N-Trig). They are a new player to the stylus market so there may be software compatibility issues like those seen with N-Trig tablets due to the lack of Wintab drivers.BMNify - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The new Windows 8.1 tablets with Baytrail are looking very good as we are getting Full OS tablets for cheap, can replace my ipad for sure.Pirks - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Jarred WTF?? These tablets have Bay Trail chips, not Clover Trail! Please fix your post, thank you.Pirks - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
grrr I wish I could delete my post above, sorry Jarred I was looking at Venue 8 and was thinking that you mean 8 Pro. my bad :( pls ignore my comment aboveloneroad - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
No, you're right. The first paragraph throws you off by saying the Pro models runs Clover Trail.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Fixed the first paragraph -- it meant to say Clover Trail on the 7/8 and Bay Trail on the Pros, but didn't quite come out right.kyuu - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Actually you were correct."The two Pro models run Windows 8.1 with Intel Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail) processors, while the Venue 7 and 8 will run Android 4.2.2 and will also use Intel Atom SoCs."
Jarred specifically states that the Pro models use Clover Trail, when it's actually Bay Trail. Your reaction was a little overboard, though. It was a simple mistake.
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I thought I fixed it and still had the wrong parts as well. Oops. It's finally (completely) correct now. Hooray for apparently having two completely different Venue Pro 11 models, one with Bay Trail and one with Haswell!Pirks - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Man, they have even DIFFERENT Haswells in there, yay! They have low end Pentium Haswell, they have higher end i3, then i5 too. This is unbelievable, I'm back at super configurable/flexible PC days with this Dell tablet hardware, nice to see Dell getting back to its roots!kyuu - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The Pentium variant is interesting. If it's substantially cheaper than the Core-i3 version, anyway. I don't need full Core-i5 level performance on my tablet, but I'm rather disappointed with Bay Trail's GPU (not that it's surprising, though) and since Temash/Kabini tablets don't exist, I'm wondering if the Pentium's iGPU is significantly better.kyuu - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
And it looks to me like the only difference between the Core-i3 and Core-i5 options is that the Core-i5 can turbo up an extra 400MHz.althaz - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
That's usually what the difference is (but it can have quite a large impact on performance).Jon Tseng - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
But wouldn't you be likely thermal limited on tablet anyway? Means marginal benefit of turbo (at least for sustained workloads) lower...PS wonder if the high end sku can run crysis - low res/setting of course but might be possible! :-p
Death666Angel - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Totally depends on the tablet. My Samsung XE700T1C (which has a fan though, not sure about these) can sustain 1GHz GPU clock and 2.4GHz CPU clock for at least 60 minutes (which is how long I played Rogue Legacy in window mode and kept an eye on Intel XTU graphs). :)savagemike - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
These do look interesting. It's too bad if they are going to handicap bay trail with 2GB limit though. I'd be quite interested to see how it'd perform with 4GB ram.What really make these interesting to me is the dock. I read someplace else it will be $99 and dual monitor capable.
Will be very curious to see these anyway. Hope Anandtech does a review of a couple configurations. That's more than I've said about a Dell product in several years.
Bob Todd - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I too am a little worried about the RAM, especially since paging to eMMC would likely be brutal. I'll end up picking up one of these Bay Trail Win 8.1 tablets anyway. Even 2GB will be sufficient to make this more useful than my Nexus 7.JNo - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I was really interested in getting an 8" baytrail tablet but now I've read about the 11" Venue Pro, I think that's the one to get...Having a much faster and larger SSD over eMMC is a big deal in my book. Then there're more ports, ac wifi, proper laptop dock with track pad and more battery (16hrs is it?!) and although 1280 would have been fine, I wouldn't complain about getting 1920 instead. Only downer is that I assume the 8" will come with full MS Office but the 11" won't. Not too big an issue though. Money no issue I'd want the 8" as well but as it is, the 11" makes more sense (for me).
SpartanJet - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Very nice! I'm going to be picking up a windows tab, now I just have to chose which one. I love the Venue 11 but I think I like Surface 2 Pro size better. The Venue 8 looks like a winner real genuine Windows 8 tablet for $300. Access to real apps and the PC isn't overrun by cash shops or micro transactions.teiglin - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Does anyone know how much free space a 32GB tablet will have after a full Windows install? Seems likely to be... not a lot. At least there's a 64GB version.Moving up to 4GB (dual channel ffs) RAM and a 1920x1200 screen would probably have me sold on the Venue 8 Pro--I think that's the sort of thing Microsoft needs to get people to be willing to live in Metro-land (what's the official name again?). Slapping touchscreens into traditional laptops doesn't suddenly make touch a better interface than a keyboard and mouse (let's be honest, it isn't and probably never will be), but at 8", touch is much more compelling.
JarredWalton - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I believe Windows RT takes 16GB more or less, which is why 32GB is the minimum. Of course, Windows applications tend to be larger than most tablet apps, though, so having only 16GB free could be a problem -- and for eMMC, you'd want at least 20% free as well, which means you need to leave 6.4GB of your 32GB free, leaving you with about 9GB of space you can use. I'm not sure but I think the full Windows 8.1 actually requires even more space, and with the swapfile it would definitely be more like 20-24GB just for Windows. :-|teiglin - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
God, I didn't even think about the swapfile. If Windows+swapfile(+Office?) actually takes up 24GiB, that's already more than 80% of the total space, meaning literally anything you put on the main eMMC will just tank performance, and even if it's "only" 20GiB, you're looking at ~3.5GB of usable space. Or are you using decimal prefixes throughout? I guess that would make the best-case estimate at around 6GB of free space. Still... I guess having an SD card to backup the eMMC is sort of a parallel to having a small boot SSD and magnetic storage to back it up? Or you could just stab yourself in the eye with a rusty nail and it'd probably be less painful.I stand by my comments about the form factor but 64GB of eMMC should really be the minimum.
Impulses - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
It really should, once temp files run amok and you install a few patches and additional programs you'd be at 32GB easily... And performance will tank, and the average user won't know he shouldn't fill the drive to capacity.nerd1 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I've been using 32GB device with win8 32bit (8GB left after installing office) and it was still manageable.nerd1 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I am glad that Dell got all the checkboxes checked (1080p, $500, active digitizer, bay trail, battery keyboard) and more (touch cover, swapable battery)Is the pen Wacom or Synaptics?
kyuu - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Synaptics, I believe.psuedonymous - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
It's been reported elsewhere (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/hands-on-de... that the Venue 11 pro will not only have a batteryless 'type cover'-like keyboard, but also a hinged keyboard 'dock' with an expanded battery.Visual - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Pentium 3560Y is not Haswell, it is Bay Trail I think.A shame that the GPUs don't go up to HD4600 for the 11 Pro. I don't think I'll be buying this then.
JarredWalton - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
The Pentium 3560Y is definitely Haswell. Look at the ARK pages for that and the Atom Z3770 to see why:http://ark.intel.com/products/76622/Intel-Pentium-...
http://ark.intel.com/products/76760/Intel-Atom-Pro...
Clocks, core count, and cache alone show it's not using Bay Trail.
Drumsticks - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
How much of an IPC lead does haswell have over bay trail? Obviously fairly significant, but how would a dual core 1.2ghz Pentium compare to the bay trail at 2.4? I'm looking to jointly (with my dad) buy my sister a PC for her high school years, and we are looking at this and the surface two on our shortlist. Bay trail does sound like something that should be fast enough for web browsing and things like that yes?JarredWalton - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
The Pentium would be faster I'm almost sure, but probably not by a huge margin. I'd guess maybe 25% faster for the CPU, and the GPU might be more like 50-75% faster. We'll have to see if we can get one of the Pentium systems for testing, though, as until then we're basically just guessing.MicroByte - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
The Venue 8 seems to fit everything I wanted from my iPad Mini but could not have. I love that it can run desktop level software without the confines of an App Store.My question though, how well would the Bay Trail processor work with older games? I would love to play something like Half-Life 2 on this, would the hardware be sufficient for something like that?
JarredWalton - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
HL2 isn't too demanding and I think it would work, but probably not at max settings.MicroByte - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
Thanks for the feedback. I would expect that most games would have to run at a lower quality which would be fine in my eyes. I've been out of the PC gaming scene for a while and really like the older games.ad24 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I am getting Surface 2, but I am really interested to know why people so much appreciate the x86 compatibility on a 8" device. Old programs can be installed but can't properly run on a low-end processor. It would be a frustrating experience even if the processor were fast enough.kyuu - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
While I tend to agree that desktop software isn't terribly interesting in an 8" form factor, the pen should make interacting with the desktop a little more bearable.Also there's the fact that people can run their library of Steam and other legacy games and emulators (obviously only the ones that aren't very demanding, of course).
Hrel - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Windows 8.1 huh? That's too bad since Windows 8 is completely and entirely unusable.The more bad decisions Microsoft makes, and makes consistently, the more I think there REALLY needs to be a solid alternative OS. Probably something Linux based, but in order for corporations to even consider using it the OS would have to be able to be administered through AD. At least for the time being. Then there'd have to be a heavy push by every tech company to support the new OS and tons of people writing drivers for it.
nerd1 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Windows 8 is the ONLY full powered OS for touchscreen usage. I did install ubuntu on my slate 7 and it was horrible.kyuu - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
"Completely and entirely unusable"? Hyperbole much? You might not like Metro, but it's perfectly usable, and there's absolutely no functionality that you lose versus Win7 (minus the Start Menu, of course). You actually gain functionality even if you entirely bypass the Metro interface (improved task manager, Storage Spaces, etc.).Valis - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
BOOO fail, Intel Atom Z3740D single channel SoC, that consumes more power than the non-D, in the Venue 8 Pro. Wont be getting one of those. No way José.joe_dude - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
The Venue 8 Pro looks tasty. I'm just not sure why I would want it over an Android tablet. Only usage cases that I can think of at the moment is for Excel on-the-go and running apps like MPC-HC.hman187 - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
The 8 pro looks great but I need to know.... How will football manager perform on it, I love the idea of a portable PC but no good if football manager don't run well loltendoboy1984 - Saturday, October 5, 2013 - link
It's about time we get tablets with 32GB storage as standard. Now the Android manufacturers need to follow suit. No more 8GB and 16GB tablets. It's 2013, we should be far ahead of those constraints.I'm very interested in those Dell Android tablets. The specs are good, the prices are great, it looks like Dell has some winners. So now I'm torn between those Dell tablets, a Kindle Fire HDX, or a Nexus 7...
trivor - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
On a full Windows 8.1 (not RT) it is over 20 GB just for Windows and another 4+GB for Office Home and Student so you have less than 8 GB left and you need to leave at least 20% free (6 GB) to make sure eMMC performance doesn't tank - that only leaves 2 GB for other apps. On Android (depending on the manufacturer bloatware (skins/enhancements) 16 GB tablet you will have anywhere from 9-12 GB free and I think on iOS your 16 GB tablets are fairly close to that or better. Even with micro SD expansion the lowest practical minimum for full Windows 8.1 tablet installs is really 64 GB or you are going to seriously hamstring yourself performance wise.dacci - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Noob question, but would it be possible to purchase the Venue 8 (android version) and put windows 8.1 on it. They are using the same processor, but the android version is much cheaper....mfox - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
I just got the venue 7 yesterday. I haven't had much time to play with, but the display color do seem a bit "muted." And there is only one speaker (mono) rather than stereo, which isn't a big deal.