Dell Venue Pro

Available now
12th October 2010

The Dell Venue Pro is a high-end Windows Phone 7 (WP7) smartphone heading for the T-Mobile network in the US by the end of the year, and possibly other markets as well.

Because Microsoft tightly control the specifications for WP7 devices, they all tend to have pretty similar specifications. Manufacturers tend to change screen sizes, camera capabilities or may add a keyboard, but ultimately the phones tend to be hard to tell apart.

Dell's approach to making their product stand out is a novel one - they've come up with one of the most stupid designs that we've seen on a phone in a long time. Perhaps the result of design by committee or a few bottles of Tactical Nuclear Penguin for lunch.

So what have Dell done? Well, on paper it looks promising - a 4.1" display and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. But for some reason, Dell have tacked the keyboard onto the bottom of the already tall Venue Pro form factor, so the whole thing slides up to make a 191 gram (6.7 ounce) handset that is 162mm (6.4 inches) tall when open.. and one that encourages you to try to type on a relatively small keyboard on the bottom while attempting not to drop the whole thing.

If you can successfully pretend that the keyboard doesn't exist, then the Dell Venue Pro looks much better.. you might even say that it looks elegant. And if you can manage to ignore the Venue Pro's keyboard, then we suggest that your life might also be improved by understanding that there are only two movies in the Alien series, they never made a sequel to The Matrix and they never did get around to making a Terminator movie set in the future.

The screen itself has a 480 x 800 pixel resolution, on the back is a 5 megapixel camera with HD video recording capabilities, and the Dell Venue Pro also has 3.5G support, WiFi and GPS.

It is possible that this is only the first of several WP7 handsets from Dell. At the moment the potential size of the WP7 market is unknown, but it's worth noting that at present Dell are the only US company that have announced a WP7 handset at all.

Dell say that the Venue Pro should be available on T-Mobile USA by "the holidays", but no guidance on pricing or other markets was available at the time of going to press.