I have been interested in the idea of a tablet running Microsoft Windows for a fairly long time. I have kept up with iOS, but my heart has been with Windows for basically the whole time. When it was announced that Windows 8 would be an OS that tries to unify the tablet and desktop worlds, complete with an ARM version, my mind immediately jumped to visions of a modern ThinkPad tablet with a Wacom stylus and OneNote.
The ThinkPad Helix does an excellent job of existing, and, well, not much else. It is one of the most expensive devices you can buy, second only to Wacom's own first party tablet, which puts an Ivy Bridge UltraBook inside a Cintiq display. Windows on ARM is nearly a complete flop and by and large, Sony and Microsoft are the vendors you go to for a reasonably priced (or very powerful) Windows device with a stylus. The Surface Pro gets excellent reviews, and its clever keyboard covers and pen make it worth the frustrating power adapter and the high price tag.
I personally have yet to find the perfect Windows 8 device, but Windows 8.1 improves on the situation a lot, and Intel was keeping a fairly impressive ace up their sleeve with the Bay Trail Atom platform. For the uninitiated, Bay Trail and Windows 8.1 have enabled a second generation of Windows tablets at lower price points, with higher performance, and most of these devices now ship with Microsoft Office. In addition, these devices offer similar or longer battery life to RT devices, and a few of them offer pretty compelling hardware features. In addition, we're now seeing 8-inch Windows tablets.
With that in mind, I purchased the Dell Venue 8 Pro from my local Staples store. The idea I had was that it would be very interesting to see what happens when you put a processor that would have been considered blazing just five to seven years ago in a device that fits in the cargo pocket of my shorts, and uses the same charger as my phone. There are some pretty extreme shortcomings to the form factor, not the least of which is that it appears to currently be impossible to have the unit charging and using wired peripherals at the same time. However, if there is going to be a device that successfully forces the issue of New Interface and RT based applications, I believe this will be the one.
Other than the soul rending lack of a regular USB port, the hardware on the Venue 8 Pro is very good. I had originally theorized that the Surface RT would be slim enough to comfortably hold and thumb type on, when held in the vertical position. Unfortunately, it was still simply too wide and the device was just too large and heavy to hold in this position for long anyway. The Venue, on the other hand, is nearly the perfect size for thumb typing. It's a lot like the iPad mini and 7 inch Android tablets. Posture and positioning continue to Na a concern for long term typing sessions, but that is a matter of the form factor at least as much as the individual device.
The Venue 8 Pro, being a regular Windows device, pairs easily to Bluetooth devices like the keyboard and mouse I had left over from an earlier experiment, although using it that way seems cheating a little bit, it does help the the presence of the desktop and Windows at all make some more sense. The Atom Z3740D in this system is pretty sprightly. It scores 1.21 in Cinebench and it gets 5.7 frames per second in the OpenGL test. These are fairly impressive numbers, both for a device that is less than $300 at retail and for a device that is as small as this one is, and gets as much battery life.
When the Surface RT came out, I was impressed that Microsoft was calling it a PC and with what you were getting for the money. The Surface cost almost twice what the Venue did, but lacks the ability to run legacy applications, in case that is important. I suppose the biggest lesson I'd say I have learned about this device is that suggesting it will make a good legacy PC replacement is a mistake. If you have extremely good vision and are aware of the additional cost of a keyboard and mouse, you can certainly connect them via Bluetooth, but the bigger display and regular USB host port make 10-inch and larger devices like the Asus T100 better choices if you were looking for a traditional PC.
So, with that in mind, what would be an ideal use for the Venue 8 Pro, or at what tasks would it be good? This is one of those situations where I think the device itself is good, but I am worried by the ecosystem (which is the reversal of a typical Microsoft situation.) The built-in and included Metro applications have improved a lot, and of course it does come with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. (The T100 comes with those applications as well.) Unfortunately, there isn't very much room for additional software, as the 32GB eMMC module comes more than half full, and while it has all of these capabilities and all of this performance, an absolutely incredible amount of performance for something its size, it just doesn't make sense unless you have a lot of network infrastructure, in order to use things like Slacker Internet Radio for music and Crackle/Hulu/Netflix for streaming video.
The pen is one of the more interesting aspects of the Venue 8 Pro, unfortunately the retail package I bought did not have it, and although I'm fairly confident I will eventually get it, I can't include any thoughts about it here. Basically though, the deal there is that with the pen, I think this will be nearly the perfect OneNote device, and the ultimate replacement to a fairly high stack of Steno notebooks. Without the pen, hand-writing into OneNote is going to be impossible, and the eternal problem with all tablets is that if your goal is to replace a paper-based notebook with a computing device of some sort, that computing device needs to have a stylus, or a keyboard.
After a few weeks with it, it's worth noting that the appeal of the Venue 8 Pro is still around. It's great for reading and it tends to fit in all of the same places the steno notebook did like inside jacket pockets and cargo pockets on shorts, but it has the advantage of having a camera, wifi, and a headphone jack.
I still have yet to buy the stylus for this device, but I really suspect that when I do, the device will take on a whole new meaning in the universe will turn on its head and no longer will I be numbering new physical steno notebooks every few months. Whether or not it was worth spending $400 or so (in total) on a replacement for 80¢ paper notebook, who knows. I'm on the sixteenth steno notebook now, and unless my use of the steno notebook increases significantly in the near future, I have a long way to go before the V8P is more cost effective on tht measurement alone.
The ultimate question with any given tablet device is whether or not it's as good as the iPad, or even better, especially given that Windows-based tablets are now advertising a full copy of Windows, and many of them are equipped with accessories designed to make the experience of using a tablet computer as "full" (for Office) as using a desktop computer. Tablets like the Asus T100, the Dell Venue 11 Pro, and the Microsoft Surface RT/Pro/2/Pro2 can deliver on this in a way that an 8-inch tablet like the Venue 8 Pro will never be able to do, beause an 8-inch screen is simply too small for desktop computing. Because of this, it's simply not possible to say "Oh, well, Metro is horrible, but it has an RDP client and Office, so I'm fine with it" like I did with the RT. Because of this, the way to answer the iPad question is to ask another question: Has Metro gained the applications you want to run, and/or are they better than on the iPad?
The answer here is "not really." The built-in calendar and mail applications are interesting, but I like the ones on my iPad better, and the iPad includes most of the same tablet OneNote functionality that the V8P does, plus it includes better Exchange functionality, it doesn't require a Windows Live sign-in, and over the years, Apple's own and third party tablet applications have gotten very, very good. I've spent a fair amount of money on applications and games for my iPad, and it simply hasn't been worthwhile to do so for the Windows device, where I can't even find a reasonably good ePub reader, something I personally think Microsoft should have been publishing on their own to begin with. Internet Explorer is pretty good, there's a Twitter, Skype, and Amazon application for Windows 8, but the SSH client is merely adequate, there isn't a good tablet-focused Word/Excel/PowerPoint, nor is there a Spotify application, a good drawing application like Paper, or iMovie/iPhoto/GarageBand, let alone things like Diet Coda, which lets you connect to a remote web site and edit it.
If you just want e-mail, Skype, Kindle, and the web, I'd say that the Venue 8 Pro is a better buy than an Android tablet, but that's at least as much because Microsoft is going to be pushing security updates to this device for the next nine years, even if Windows 9 is not a free upgrade from 8.1. Most Android tablets won't get security updates beyond this coming June, and it's not clear right now how long software updates will available for iPads. (There is an established pattern for iPhones, but Apple's doing some slightly different things with the iPad product line.)