There’s been a lot of great media coverage this week about our CES ‘Best of Innovation’ award-winning Venue 8 7000 Series tablet, including comments like “it can’t get much thinner than this” and descriptions such as “incredibly slim body, eye-popping screen and first-of-its-kind stereoscopic camera, the Android device makes tablets interesting again.”
What may have gotten overlooked in all the talk about the new hardware innovations, is the Dell-developed software that makes that stereoscopic Intel RealSense Snapshot Depth Camera really useful to tablet owners.
“Intel's 3D camera is being put in a number of laptops, but Dell is the first company we've seen to actually take advantage of the software with Dell Gallery, its new photo manager,” said Micah Singleton of The Verge.
I had the chance to speak with the leader of the team that developed Dell Gallery, Executive Director of Technology Strategy at Dell Todd Basche, during CES and asked him about what went into it.
“We spent a lot of time, beginning about a year ago, thinking about what software we could do that would really bring this incredible platform to life,” he said. “A lot of people when they play with the software, they say ‘Wow! That’s fantastic! Who’d you buy that from?’ and we developed this ourselves.”
Three things he was excited to enable customers to do with Dell Gallery on the Venue 8 7000 include:
- Take a picture and immediately take a measure of it, which I shared on Tuesday our customer visual artist Aerosyn-Lex Mestrovic puts it to real use in his business. (For less-serious photos, it can also mean no more wondering about how big that fish your friend caught really was.)
- The ability to refocus any part of the picture after it’s been taken, gives you greater control over the final product. (Could it be the end of the photobomb?)
- And, it provides real-time application of 3D filters such as changing the brightness only on a foreground object or background object with just the slide of your finger.
“My favorite part is being able to instantly change the background to black and white while keeping the subject in color,” said Joanna Stern in the Wall Street Journal. “Instant Hallmark card!”
The Dell Gallery also organizes photos into smart albums and gathers photos from Dropbox, Picasa and Facebook into one place. They are then sorted automatically into smart albums by timeline, geography or facial recognition.
So, it’s great that when engadget named the Venue 8 7000 an official Best of CES Award winner for Best Mobile Device they talked about the quad-core Intel Atom processor with 2GB of RAM and its almost bezel-less 8.4-inch OLED screen running at 2,560 x 1,600 and the Intel RealSense camera.
But don’t forget the importance of the Dell-designed software to make the mobile device something you can use every day. And don’t wait to get yours from Dell.com now if you’re in the United States.
“I’ve been told Intel employees ran to the store to buy [Dell’s Venue 8 7000] in mass they so wanted them when they came out,” Analyst Rob Enderle said.
The tablet should be available in Canada this week, and we expect to see the Venue 8 7000 Series in early 2015 in the following countries: Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, India, Germany and the UK.
