Dell Venue Pro Finally Reaches The UK

Dell’s long awaited Venue Pro Windows Phone 7 handset has been officially launched for UK customers, although it won’t start shipping until next week.

The business focused handset runs Windows Phone 7, which was launched in October last year. Dell’s Venue Pro was listed at the launch as one of the handsets running WP7, but it was only expected to available for customers around Christmas time.

And now almost five months after it was first mooted, Dell has confirmed that the handset is available to UK customers as of 1 March, direct from Dell. It will begin shipping next week. The five month delay to the arrival of the handset was reportedly down to a firmware issue.

Slightly Large Handset

It will cost £382.50 excluding VAT and shipping charges. The device is SIM-free and should work on any UK network.

eWEEK Europe UK did manage to get its hands on the Venue Pro at the October launch of Windows Phone 7. We found it to be a relatively large phone overall, somewhat thicker and heavier than other Windows Phones, thanks to its slider keyboard.

It runs a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It has a 4.1-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen with 800×480 pixels, a 5Mpixel camera with digital zoom and LED flash. It also comes with 512MB SDRAM, 1GB flash ROM, and 16GB of storage, thanks to a non removable MicroSD card.

The device also comes with the usual handset features such as 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, coupled with an accelerometer and proximity sensor, as well as a digital compass and Bing Maps for navigation purposes. It also includes a browser and – like all Windows Phone 7 devices – Office document editing facilities (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). More importantly for business users, it offers easy integration with Microsoft Exchange Server email messaging.

And it allows the user to play Xbox Live games in case the busy executive needs some relief from stress [personally. I find such things add to my stress- Editor].

Windows Phone 7

Devices such as the Venue Pro are important, as for many observers Windows Phone 7 represents Microsoft’s last attempt to break into the crowded mobile operating system market.

The operating system has gathered some good reviews and also received a huge boost when Nokia agreed it would form the basis of its smartphone strategy going forward, although CEO Stephen Elop faced fierce criticism of the move.

There are ongoing question marks over the actual sales of Windows Phone 7 handsets. At the end of January, Redmond confirmed that manufacturers had sold some 2 million Windows Phone 7 units to retailers. But so far the exact number of devices reaching consumers’ hands remains unclear.

And matters were not helped when it emerged that the latest Windows Phone 7 update caused problems for an unknown number of users. The company also withheld the update for Samsung smartphones.

Microsoft has since confirmed that the update failed for 10 percent of users, but blamed a bad Internet connection or insufficient computer storage space.