Dell Venue Pro deals & review

The Venue Pro is one of the first phones to feature Windows Phone 7, the long awaited update to Windows Mobile. This is the first such phone from Dell, a company that is fairly new to the smartphone market. The Venue Pro comes packed with all the obligatory WP7 entertainment features as well as a whole host of professional features on board. The most striking thing about the Venue Pro from the outset is its unusual keyboard, which slides out beneath the screen rather than the side.

This is not an unheard of design although it is unusual to see on a touchscreen phone, particularly considering that the keypad that is revealed is a QWERTY one rather than a bog standard numeric pad that is usually found on vertical sliders. The keypad is naturally quite condensed to fit in this orientation and is somewhat reminiscent of a keyboard you would find on many of BlackBerry´s iconic smartphones.

Thanks to Windows Phone 7 the Venue Pro comes with some excellent professional features to help you put the keyboard to good use, including fantastic email support and MS Office document editor. Messaging is not just limited to email as you are also provided with instant messaging as well as threaded SMS, and MMS.

Like all of the WP7 phones released at its launch the Dell Venue Pro comes with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor under its belt which, combined with the 512MB RAM, provides a very smooth and seamless interface to enjoy. The phone is quad band GSM, with 3G and Wi-Fi support, as well as GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth and microUSB.

The Zune media player one board has excellent support for music and video, and there is also an FM radio with RDS present. There is 8GB of storage space available and this can be upgraded with microSD cards to provide you with even more space for media to enjoy on the go. You can also use this to store photos and video captured on the Venue Pro´s 5 megapixel camera.

The screen on the Venue Pro is of a very impressive quality, with a 4.1" AMOLED display that features Gorilla Glass and capacitive multitouch input. This also has a very high resolution WVGA graphics with 16 million colours to truly show off the interface and media you have on board.

The Venue Pro is a superb phone which benefits from a number of fantastic software and hardware features. There is a top of the line screen, speedy processor and many great entertainment features to make use of in terms of music, video and the web. The Dell Venue Pro is also one of the first phones to make use of Windows Phone 7 which brings a number of its own benefits including greater social networking integration, Xbox LIVE and a whole host of software features to satisfy every professional phone user. The QWERTY keyboard design is slightly unusual and may be a key selling point to the Venue Pro, but perhaps a turn off for others.