Dell confirms no compass support for Venue Pro

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Bad news for you die-hard Venue Pro users, Dell has seemingly confirmed that no compass-support will be coming to the device. It was  about a month ago after the unlocked and T-Mobile versions of the DVP received their Mango updates did we noticed that no compass support was on board. From Lionel Menchaca, Dell's chief blogger:

"@HotmailAlias The update hasn't yet happened on the AT&T version of the #dellvenuepro. The compass function will not be supported."

At the time, it looked like an error on installation where the driver was deleted. But now it appears that this is on purpose. As far as we can tell, the hardware should support compass but for some reason, Dell has opted to not enable it. We're unsure how OEMs make decisions on these matters and whether they have to license and pay for access to that hardware (much like back in the day with aGPS and Qualcomm), but between the Radar (see review) and Venue Pro, it's a bit unsettling to have a fairly basic smartphone feature disabled in our hardware.

Source: Twitter; Thanks, Daniel R., for the tip!

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Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.