Sections
- Page 1 Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 Review
- Page 2 Software and Performance Review
- Page 3 Battery Life, Camera and Verdict Review
Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 – Software and Performance
Dell provides quite a few optional accessories with this tablet, including a keyboard dock and active stylus. With them there’s the potential for this tablet to be far more versatile but without them to test I can only judge this tablet on its own.
As such it’s no surprise that one of its greatest weaknesses is the core tablet experience. Windows 10 just doesn’t have the sleekness of an iPad or Android tablet and it’s severely lacking in tablet-optimised apps too.
While the web browser can do an awful lot, the touch-screen interaction you have with a tablet means it still would be more useful to have, for instance, a YouTube app.
Nonetheless, you can get by and this is actually the first time I’ve really settled into using a Windows tablet almost exclusively in Tablet Mode, rather than dropping back to desktop view.
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However that’s precisely because I wasn’t doing anything particularly taxing on it. For watching video, browsing the web and checking my email it’s great. If I then need to do a few file transfers or browse the media on my NAS drive I can just open File Explorer.
Anything much more than that, though, largely means having to drop into desktop mode and running an app that isn’t touch-optimised.
Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056 – Performance
When just doing light duties such as web browsing and checking email in tablet mode the Venue 10 Pro is perfectly up to the job. It’s fairly quick to boot and there’s little delay switching between apps, plus it copes well with visually rich and advert-filled websites – always a test for modestly powerful Windows devices.
Drop to the desktop and start multi-tasking, though, and things soon slow up. The Intel Atom X5 Z8500 processor at this tablet’s heart just can’t cope. It gets the job done, but slowly and with regular pauses.
As such, and considering it only has 64GB of SSD storage, I wouldn’t recommend it for a regular work tool but as a portable addition to a work setup it could be useful.
Putting the Venue 10 Pro to the test with some benchmarks this very modest performance is highlighted. In PCMark 7 it scored just 2741, compared to 4027 for the Dell XPS 12, which is already a fairly underpowered device. Similarly, it scored just 3113 in Geekbench 3, compared to 4267 for the XPS 12.
Not that gaming is really much of a concern with this sort of a device but it’s also no surprise it can’t exactly power through 3D games. A 3D Mark Ice Storm score of 16,187 is again nearly half what the XPS 12 can achieve.
How we test tablets
We test every tablet we review thoroughly. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly and we use the tablet as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
