Tablet Review: Dell Streak

A good Streak

by Hedirman Supian

05:55 AM Dec 24, 2010

THE Dell Streak ($938) is gorgeous.

With its stylishly tapered curves and a petite frame, it's easily one of the more handsome devices running the Android operating system. Our review unit sports a back adorned with a screaming glossy red finish (no, it doesn't look as tacky as it sounds) but you can opt for the black model as well.

Its bright 5-inch touchscreen display has a layer of tough Gorilla Glass. The Streak has a removable battery but its construction is reassuringly rigid, not flimsy.

On the hardware side, it has WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity, along with GPS and a digital compass. There's a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera on its rear with dual LED flash as well as a front-facing VGA webcam. The tablet's powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and features 2GB of built-in storage, expandable up to 32GB via a microSD slot.

In use, the Streak is snappy when it comes to most tasks. There's just that slight lag when it comes to the touchscreen controls. Performance suffers when it's running Flash videos in YouTube. In one case, it kept crashing the browser as well. While it can run videos rather smoothly, you can't quite do anything else. So despite having the ability to run Flash, it does so with some caveats.

Is the Dell Streak a tablet or an oversized smartphone? Even with its 5-inch touchscreen display, it doesn't look too outrageously big when you're holding it up to your face to answer a call thanks to its svelte form factor. And it's compact enough so you can comfortably hold it in your palm (it weighs 220g) and use your thumb to operate the touchscreen when you're on the move.

We're fortunate that the Streak's come to our shores loaded with version 2.2 of the Android OS so you'll get most of the latest features, like the ability to use the Streak as a mobile WiFi hotspot. However, there are no plans yet for an update to version 2.3.

Dell's included its own set of enhancements to the user interface. A set of its own spruced-up widgets, dubbed Stage, provides some eye candy and easier access to contacts, email, gallery, music and status updates on Twitter and Facebook. You can add, move (or even remove) these around the various home screens but there's not much customisation allowed.

Dell's also included a mini icon dock at the bottom of the screen - it only appears when you tap at the bottom of the screen - which gives you instant access to any of your home screens.

Battery life was good despite the inclusion of the bigger screen. We managed to eke out almost 11 hours of usage with regular use of multimedia playback, WiFi, GPS and 3G connectivity.

What we didn't quite like about the Streak is the omission of the Search key that's standard on most Android-based handsets. One of the major selling points and a differentiating factor that makes Android attractive is, after all, instant search at your fingertips.

The Dell also comes with its own proprietary port instead of a standard micro or mini USB, which means you can only plug the device into your computer with a cable from Dell. Hedirman Supian

Source: www.todayonline.com