Dell Venue 8 Pro Digitizer - What a Disappointment!

I guess I'll start from the beginning, though perhaps it may be of little interest to some. For whatever it's worth, I've been a longtime Dell customer, starting way back in the 486 era with a Precision 433Si (a computer I'd very much like to find another example of!) desktop. Between then and now, I've purchased (and rescued from the trash collection :emotion-2: ) many Dell products both new and used. Amongst those, only a Dimension 8300 has ever proven to be a disappointment.

Dell's Venue 8 Pro tablet recently caught my attention, and even though I thought it could have been better by including such features as a proper video output connection or even a GPS, I picked one up. The reviews I found at the time seemed pretty positive, and so I went through with the purchase by ordering the 64GB model from Amazon.com

Right from the start, the touch screen seemed unnecessarily difficult to use. When in the "Metro" environment, it was generally tolerable, but out on the classic Windows desktop, it proved utterly maddening to do almost anything. Small controls like sliders and checkboxes were very frustrating to use. I soon came to these forums (amongst other places) and read of the difficulties many were having with the Synaptics digitizer. And so, for whatever good it might do, I'm throwing my hat in the ring to say that this digitizer is a seriously deficient, sorry piece of technology. Even after applying all of the updates offered by Dell as of this writing, I still had serious problems with it. No attempt at calibration improved things, and as the unit warmed up, I also noticed what seemed like thermal drift. Whenever I'd use the onscreen keyboard, double striking of characters was also a problem.

What ultimately confirmed my suspicions was trying the digitizer on a Microsoft Surface product in a store demonstration. The Surface's digitizer walked all over that of the Venue 8 Pro I received. It wasn't even a competition.

Windows 8 could use some fine tuning, although that's a story for another place. My biggest gripe there is having to activate the keyboard input panel manually when running applications on the classic desktop. Is this an effort by Microsoft to push people into using Metro apps (which do summon the input panel automatically)? I'm not impressed.

Looking over posts on this forum shows that Dell employees have been promising further updates and refinements to the digitizer technology for the better part of two months. I realize that QA takes time, but here on the customer end of things, I'm sure many of us are wondering if this train wreck of a digitizer will ever work correctly.

I thought about picking up the Dell stylus in hopes of making input more precise, but that's apparently a whole other can of worms. As such, I'm sorry to say I've decided to cut my losses at this point and arranged to return the Venue Pro 8 to Amazon.com. I don't feel at all compelled to engage technical support, mainly because I'm afraid of being strung along until it's too late to return the product.

I'd really have liked for it to have worked out, yet my confidence in this product has been shaken too much. Hopefully Dell's next entry in the Windows 8 tablet marketplace will be better. Maybe they'll even get these problems fixed with the current generation product. I just can't take the chance that this might never happen...