Dell Venue Pro: Lightning Strikes
by Vivek Gowri on March 14, 2011 3:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Dell
- Windows Phone 7
- Smartphones
- Venue Pro
- Mobile
Dell Venue Pro - Camera and Video
The Venue Pro has a 5MP camera with an LED flash, similar to many other smartphones on the market. And like so many of its competitors, it’s a pretty decent camera, so long as you have a lot of natural light. Switch to artificial can lighting or night time photography, and your pictures are suddenly an unusable grainy mess.
Daytime shot of an Audi R8
The same R8, this time at night.
Dell shouldn’t take it personally, it’s basically par for the course as far as smartphones go. Unfortunately, next to some of the rest of the WP7 crowd, it’s a bit lacking as far as editing options. You get to change ISO settings, white balance, and four scene modes. That’s about it, which absolutely pales in comparsion to the Samsung Focus’ long list of setting options.
Gallery: Dell Venue Pro Camera Samples
It’s overall not a huge deal though - usually with smartphone cameras, you don’t have too much time to mess with settings anyways. What is a huge deal is the camera button and the lack of a software shutter release. Like the lock button at the top of the device, the camera button is slightly recessed and an absolute pain to press. When you do press it, you invariably end up putting enough of a downward force on the device to unbalance it and give the phone a little shake as it takes a picture. That’s a great recipe for motion blur! I swear, a full two thirds of my pictures ended up resembling photos taken by the elusive Mr. Blurrycam. I started taking batches of 5 or 6 of the same shot to maximize my chances of getting one decent picture, and invariably ended up with no clear, usable images from the entire set. Example, this one of my living room. It's a bit blurry, but that's amazingly the clearest one of the lot. Maybe I just suck at taking pictures on this phone.
A very easy way to eliminate this effect is to just toss a software shutter release button in the camera app, similar to how many Android phones have camera buttons in the hardware and software. It makes sense, but I won’t hold my breath for it - the WP7 requirements list a hardware camera button for a reason. But if you have a steady hand, the Venue Pro is easily capable of web-quality photos, which is about all you can ask from a smartphone camera.
The video camera is decent, good enough for web quality video, but nothing earth shattering. The first-gen Snapdragon processors are limited to capturing either 640x480 at 30fps or 720p at 24fps. No problems with the microphone here, so no repeat of Brian’s issues with the Surround.
Update: Here's the video sample. YouTube compression was basically killing it, so I switched to Vimeo.
AnandTech - Dell Venue Pro Video Sample 2 from Vivek Gowri on Vimeo.
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tipoo - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
The code names were cooler than the final names. Thunder, Lightning, Flash, and Smoke sounded awesome.VivekGowri - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I completely agree with that, hence the title. How awesome would it be to carry a phone called the Lightning? Woulda gone well with the HTC Thunderbolt too.aegisofrime - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
For some reason those codenames reminded me of Warcraft 3therealnickdanger - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
So awesome. :)zipz0p - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking - I actually happened to be playing the soundtrack myself as I was reading it, totally coincidentally. Good work Vivek!magicrog - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I don't care what the phone is called - I have an iphone and to be honest the signal pick up is worse then when I had my nokia 6310 and battery life is awful.If it has a great name - lets hope the phone lives up to it.
http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/magician-surrey.html
FATCamaro - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Lousy speed, lousy camera, lousy battery life, lousy screen compared to Android devices and iphone. Yet the author thinks this could be a winner. Amazing!Flunk - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
He says the screen is very good and most people don't care at all about the camera. If they did they wouldn't be using a phone because all phone cameras are worthless.IE really is a big problem but at least they're trying to fix it.
On another topic, there are no IM clients for Windows Phone 7 because sockets support hasn't been released yet so it's not possible to write IM clients unless you're tunneling through a HTTP connection which is far from ideal.
VivekGowri - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
The screen is good - it's a little bit dimmer than the Focus and Nexus one, but it's not a bad screen at all. Battery life on the AMOLED devices really depends on how much white is being displayed on the screen - that makes a huge difference in how much power the displays consume, and in our battery life test, that puts AMOLED devices at an inherent disadvantage compared to LCD screens.Also, as much as I hate to say it, when I said winner, I meant relative to other WP7 devices. Which lowers the bar for a successful device significantly.
Microsoft really needs to fast track their updates and get the second generation devices out as soon as possible. The faster they can gain back ground on Apple and Google, the faster they get some meaningful marketshare. Nokia will help with that, but MS shouldn't be depending on them, they need to get some success with the rest of the partners too.
NoSoMo - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I have to say, you guys could have done much better on the pics....I've come to expect so much more from ya.....