Regarding the measure of dexterity of robot manipulators, two geometric tools, manipulability ellipsoids and manipulability polytopes, are examined and compared with each other. Even though the manipulability ellipsoid approach is the most widely used technique, it is shown that the manipulability ellipsoid transforms the inexact joint velocity constraints into task space and so it may fail to give an exact measure of dexterity and optimal direction of motion in task space. After showing that the polytope approach can handle such problems, we propose a practical polytope method which can be applied to 3-dimensional task space in general. The relation between manipulability ellipsoids and manipulability polytopes are also explored for a redundant case and a non-redundant one.