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Modern UI Home screen, Windows Store applications

The highly-contrasted and bright screen of the Dell Venue 8 Pro enlightens Windows 8's home screen, and its famous colored tiles: the rendering on screen is very sharp, with smooth fonts, and so are fullscreen images from some applications like Bing Food & Drink.

The display defaults to three rows of tiles (or three columns in Portrait mode), which can sound rather pessimistic on a 800-pixel height (or width in Portrait mode) screen: it seems that there would be enough space to fit an additional 4th row of tiles, but it seems that Microsoft didn't choose this path, because, even with the "Show more tiles" option available on the Settings > Home Screen tiles menu, it leads to 4 rows of tiles... within roughly the same space!

You can workaround these choices, and tuneup the number and size of the tiles you're showing on the screen, by tweaking some settings on the Windows Registry, or more easily, by using an application like Metro Scaler.

The overall Windows 8 experience, which often seems rather imperfect on a non-touch enabled PC, feels great on tablet devices, and most of the "gestures" soon become intuitive: scrolling with the finger from the left side swaps from an application to another, a swipe from the top border closes the active application, and a swipe from the bottom leads to the application's contextual menu, similar to what you'd expect using the "Menu" button on an Android device.

At least, a swipe with the finger from the right-hand side of the screen gives access to the famous "Charms bar", which offers search features, links to devices and main system settings, replacing, most of the time, the classical Start menu, except to access all the installed applications, which you can reach by scrolling the tiles from the Home screen to the top.

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