Dell Venue 8

The Dell Venue 8 looks like every other nondescript tablet on the market, although it feels pretty well put together. It measures 8.35 by 5.11 by 0.38 inches (HWD) and weighs 13 ounces. The squared-off edges remind me of the first-generation iPad, and they make the buttons easy to access without having to lift up the tablet.

The Venue 8 has an 8-inch IPS LCD display with 1280-by-800 resolution at 188 pixels per inch. It isn't too sharp, and it looks a little blurry on image-heavy Web sites.

The Venue 8 has dual-band 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth 4.0. It beats the Nook HD in connectivity options, but only by one Wi-Fi band. The Nexus 7 adds NFC and wireless charging.

Tablets, for the most part, are not really meant for photography and usually take middling photos. The Venue 8's 5-megapixel camera is no different. Most photos were noisy, indoors and out. The 2-megapixel front-facing camera is worse than your average camera, but is at least on par with the Nexus 7's front-facing shooter.

Dell's Venue 8 is one of the rare Android tablets with an Intel processor. It's a recently-released dual-core Atom Z2580 processor clocked at 2.0GHz, with 2GB RAM. The specs may sound impressive, but its performance against mainstream ARM-based tablets is what really matters. In the graphics benchmark GFXBench, the Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Nexus 7 crushed the Venue 8's adequate 39 frames per second with its own 54 frames.

The Dell Venue 8 makes a less compelling argument than its smaller sibling, the Venue 7. At $149, the 7-inch model is a viable choice for an inexpensive tablet, but the case for the $179 8-inch model isn't as clear-cut.