Dell Venue 8 7000 Series Tablet is a Crazy Thin Aluminum Beauty

Dell is refreshing some of their Venue tablets, including a stylish new look for the Venue 8. The Venue 8 7000 Series will be made of machined aluminum, with good enough specs inside to ensure that the tablet performs as well as it looks.

The Venue 8 7000 series will boast an 8.4″ 2560 x 1600 OLED display (361 ppi), which scores extra aesthetic points by being edge-to-edge. That machined aluminum body is very thin at 6 mm (the thinnest tablet, for what that’s worth, which I suspect diminishes every time someone makes the claim), and the whole thing weighs just 305 grams (0.67 pounds). Inside, there’s a quad-core 2.3 GHz Intel Atom processor backed by 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, which will run Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box.

Cameras look like standard fare, with an 8 MP rear camera and a 2 MP front camera, but there’s a little more to that rear camera. It’s an Intel RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera, making the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series the first commercial tablet to carry one. This camera will be able to map out depth for all pictures taken, which opens up some interesting 3D editing possibilities in the Dell Gallery app.

For connectivity, you can expect 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Miracast, so you’ll be able to mirror your tablet’s display onto some smart televisions. There’s only 16 GB of eMMC storage, but the Micro SD card slot can expand that by, impressively, up to 512 GB. All of this will be powered by a 5,900 mAh battery.

There will also be a host of software features that, for a change, might actually be of interest to you. Dell Gallery is maybe a little much, using facial recognition to create photo albums of your friends using Facebook tags. The productivity features are a little more intriguing, including Dell Cast. Using the Dell Cast Adaptor, you can connect the Venue 8 7000 Series to a keyboard, mouse, and external monitor, which you can use to edit files and open multiple browser windows to get a little more work done than you could with the average tablet. The Venue 8 7000 Series also looks to be business-friendly with Dell Data Protection, which allows IT departments to remotely manage, secure, and, if necessary, wipe files from a tablet.