If you've been holding off on buying a Windows tablet until prices have dropped below the $100 mark, your wait is over. The 32GB Dell Venue 8 Pro 3000 Series is an 8-inch model that costs just $99, offers close to 7 hours of battery life and sports a vibrant In-Plane Switching (IPS) display. It's not the speediest performer out there, and its audio is somewhat tinny, but if money is tight, this is one bargain that's hard to beat. As such, it's our first Editors' Choice budget Windows slate tablet.

Design and Features
The Venue 8 Pro measures 8.51 by 5.11 by 0.35 inches (HWD) and weighs 14.08 ounces, which is just a tad heavier than the E-Fun Nextbook 8 and the LG G Pad X 8.3, both of which weigh 12.96 ounces, and the previous iteration of the Dell Venue 8 Pro (13.44 ounces) we reviewed back in 2013. Our review unit has a black, textured case, but you can also order it in white. The 8-inch screen maxes out at 1,280 by 800, which is relatively low compared with the 1,920-by-1,200-resolution display on the Android-equipped Dell Venue 8 (2014) we reviewed in 2014, but this newer model uses an IPS panel to deliver very good color quality and inky blacks. Unlike the 2014 Android model, its screen doesn't suffer from narrow viewing angles; color fidelity and luminance remain true from every angle.

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The built-in speaker on the bottom edge is relatively loud and predictably tinny; you'll get much better audio using the headphone jack. On the right edge are a micro USB 2.0/Power port, a Windows button, a volume-control switch, and a microSD card slot.

The Venue 8 Pro has a 1.2-megapixel front camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. The front camera is adequate for video chats, but image quality is grainy. The rear camera offers much sharper image quality, but colors are a bit washed out, and whites have a yellowish tinge. The Toshiba Encore 2 Write, another top pick, offers a better overall camera experience.

Wireless networking is provided via a single-band Realtek 802.11b/g/n adapter and Bluetooth 4.0 circuitry. As with the E-Fun Nextbook 10.1 and the Asus VivoTab Note 8, the Venue 8 Pro has only 32GB of solid-state storage, but you can supplement that with a microSD card. More expensive models, like the Asus VivoTab Note 8 and the Toshiba Encore 2, offer 64GB of storage.

The tablet bundles Windows 8.1 with Bing. It also comes with 20GB of Dropbox file storage (free for one year) and a one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365. Dell covers this tablet with a one-year warranty.

Performance
The Venue 8 Pro has 1GB of memory and uses last year's Intel Atom Z3735G processor, which runs at 1.33GHz. As we saw with the E-Fun Nextbook 10.1, which offers the same configuration, the Venue 8 Pro delivers middling performance, though it's pretty good for the price. Its score of 1,420 points on our PCMark 8 Work Conventional benchmark test was only slightly behind that of the E-Fun 10.1 (1,431) and trailed the more expensive Microsoft Surface 3 (1,610), which uses a more current and more powerful Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor. It lagged behind the Asus Transformer Book T200TA-C1-BL (1,719) by nearly 300 points. The Venue 8 Pro was unable to complete our Photoshop and Handbrake multimedia tests, due to the sparse amount of RAM. For its low price, this system will give you decent performance, particularly in day-to-day productivity tasks, like word processing and creating simple spreadsheets.

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Basic Web-browsing duties or with streaming audio and video are trouble-free with the Venue 8 Pro. However, it's a bit sluggish when opening applications, switching between programs, and when changing its screen orientation. It lasted a respectable 6 hours 55 minutes on our battery rundown test, beating both the E-Fun 10.1 (5:52) and the Asus T200TA (5:25) by more than an hour. However, it couldn't touch the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 AnyPen With Windows (9:10), or the Toshiba Encore 2 Write (9:03).

Conclusion
The Dell Venue 8 Pro 3000 Series is a full-fledged 8-inch Windows tablet for less than $100. Its IPS display offers bold colors and wide viewing angles, and you'll get close to 7 hours of battery life between charges. It won't wow you with speedy performance, and its rear-facing camera could be better, but at this price, these aren't major issues. If you're willing to spend about $300 more, and you want a Windows tablet with excellent digitizer and handwriting-capture skills, check out the Toshiba Encore 2 Write. But if you're looking to spend no more than $100, the Dell Venue 8 Pro, our first Editors' Choice budget Windows slate tablets, will fit the bill.