DELL Venue 8 - a rant

Anyone who thinks Dell actually listen to their customers or even gives a damn about them has got it all wrong. Anyone who thinks that the Dell Venue 8 is without problems has got it all wrong. Personally I think I've been duped with by Dell.

You won't see many complaints from lawyers or executives about the Dell Venue 8. Of course not, they won't be looking at a budget tablet will they! Those guys will go for the expensive big brand name tablets which most probably be tax deductible. In my case the only affordable tablet as a senior, was this piece of crap by Dell.

The tablet isn't all crap but if the complaints are not looked into and dealt with, it might as well be since I couldn't use it.

Not unlike others I usually only leave a review when I'm extremely angry at a company, service or product or I've had an extremely happy experience with a company, product or service.Now, the unfortunate thing is there are professional reviewers out there propping-up products and those reviewers, I think, should make it known up-front they're being paid or somehow rewarded for their reviews.

On the other hand there are those who, for some reason or other feel they should write a review within a couple of days of purchasing a product or service. I just paid for a product with my hard-earned money and you want me to tap on the like button? I give you my money and you want me to give you free frikin advertising? You got that one wrong pal.

Just in case you haven't figured it out by now, I'm pretty pissed-off at Dell. My experience with the Dell Venue 8 got me pretty frustrated and after doing some web research I finally went to the website of the place where I purchased the V8 - futureshop (a subsidiary of Bestbuy)

I started writing the review using the V8 but then I got a hell of a surprise. I ended up having to use my netbook because the first problem I had to face was the inability to tap on a star. I thought it was the website itself until I accessed the website using my phone, my V8 and the netbook. Let me explain this using pictures.

Fig. 1 Notice the 5 white stars

 So, if I was going to write a review I would need to click or tap on a number of stars. Using the netbook and the phone I had no problem (see Fig. 3) but using the V8 just wasn't cutting it. Go ahead give it a try.

Fig. 2 Notice the one red star

Fig. 3 Dell Venue 8 get a single star

I realise this review is longer than what I originally intended but the story had to be told.

The frustration finally got the best of me and today I decided to call Dell to try to solve the technical issues.

After 20 minutes of waiting of waiting what seemed to be an eternity I got to speak to a person.

On three occasions during the telephone call I had to remind that person that I was using the Android and not the Windows (Venue 8 Pro) version.

This person tells me I've had the tablet for a hundred twenty odd days - I almost blew a gasket - I cannot understand how DELL made it to where it is in the desktop market with these issues. My DELL Venue 8 tablet is 33 days old. They corrected themselves and finally said that's the date it was sent to the retailer.

So, am I getting any closer to the end of this rant you ask, yes I am. I am a technical and user documentation author so I tend to get into too much detail at times so please bear with me.

The difficulties I've faced are pretty much the same as what others are facing. Here are the main points:

• The tablet sometimes shuts-down and reboot on its own. When it does, it will change the wallpaper to a default wallpaper on its own and for no specific reason. 
• On some websites the pages are not rendered properly.Black boxes appear all over and the tablet goes crazy. I believe this is happening more often on sites like feedly.com
• Once this happens, I can no longer do a screen capture and have to shut the tablet down
• And like everybody else the tablet sometimes freezes and I need to power off and back on again.

Fig. 4 Black boxes

Fig. 5 More black boxes

Fig. 6 I wasn't the only one with black boxes

Fig. 6 Black boxes Dell hasn't heard of.

I might not be a technician but this all seems to me that it is graphics problem.

What bothers the crap out of me is that DELL knows there's something wrong (as can be witnessed by other reviews) but they will not admit to it. If it was a auto mobile everyone would jump on the bandwagon with a class-action suit of some kind.

So what I'm saying is that the DELL Venue 8 might look cheaper on paper when you start comparing to other tablets BUT will end up costing you more in wasted time trying to solve the technical problems which end up NOT being solved. And that's not accounting for the frustration.

Dell, if you're reading this, I want my money back and I also want to be paid for wasting my time.