The Dell Venue Pro was released to little fanfare in October, except that there were problems with Wi-Fi. Negative press about a new phone release is the last thing anyone needs, and Dell had it in spades. They ended up offering to replace faulty phones with new ones in an attempt to placate irate owners.

This worked for the most part, the replacement phones had better Wi-Fi reception and all was well with the world. Since then Dell hasn’t been idle. The FCC received a new application for the Dell Venue Pro phone, which it has recently approved.

The new application specifies that the new Venue Pro will come with WCDMA bands II and V support. That means AT&T, Rogers, Bell and Telus customers can look forward to enjoyingit soon.

The Venue Pro has yet to make it as a release. It’s a solid contender, but has yet to make serious headway in the marketplace. Designed as a business phone, it also has many features for leisure users such as, Xbox LIVE and pre-loaded work/life applications, 4.1-inch WVGA AMOLED multi-touch display, and 5MP auto-focus camera.

In an effort to increase the take-up of the new phone, Dell offered loudly to replace the Blackberry devices of its 25,000 employees with one of these phones for free when it came time to upgrade. How effective this has been remains to be seen as it hasn’t really had long enough to manifest. When asked, Blackberry saw it as a PR stunt saying there wasn’t any money to be made from it.

Along the same lines, news of another new Dell phone came out over the holidays, Dell phones & the Venue. This is allegedly the phone codenamed “Thunder” that was hinted at during 2010, and is now viewable in the flesh.

It is a lightweight version of the Venue Pro, without the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s currently slated for launch in Korea and will make its way over here soon.

The hardware specs are pretty much the same as the Pro, with a 4.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a curved Gorilla glass display running at 800 x 480 pixels. The 5-megapixel camera is the same too. The camera comes with an ability to capture videos of 720p quality, which is nice.

We’re not sure whether the lack of keyboard on the Venue is a deal-breaker or not. While the slide out did make the Pro quite bulky, it added a certain class to the phone. The touchscreen version on the Android phone is just as usable, but takes away that certain something that business users are likely to miss. While the target market may not have changed, the appeal may have done.

The other main change, apart from the lack of keyboard is that the Venue will run Android 2.2 Froyo instead of Windows Phone 7. There were whispers of the OS change for the Venue Pro too, but we have yet to see a firm release as yet.