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Dell Streak review

By Clare Hopping, 14 Jul 2010

Rating:

The Dell Streak is the first in a stream of Android tablets to appear on the market. We review it to see if it’s in the same league as the Apple iPad

Battery life is pretty good, but you’d expect nothing else from a 1530mAh battery – one of the largest out there. If you’re planning on using the Streak just for data, you can expect to get a couple of day’s usage out of it.

If you throw in phone calls, you can expect to get about five to six hours of talk time. Pretty impressive if you ask us, especially when you consider there’s a large screen to power.

On a side note, you may recognise the USB port…it’s almost identical to Apple’s infamous proprietary connection, although don’t try to swap between the two.

It’s really quirt irritating - in a time when there are many companies attempting to produce a universal charger culture -that companies such as Dell and Apple break the mould by throwing in a larger proprietary port. It takes away the ability to charge all of your devices with one universal charger.

The Dell Streak is much more effective as a small tablet than as a large smartphone. We wouldn’t recommend even purchasing one with voice activated.

It’s a shame that the device is so slow though, and running on Android 1.6 just isn’t acceptable on such a hyped device. Although it will be updated in future, as it stands, we were expecting more.

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2 comments

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Wow, what a dreadful article

First off, let's take a look at the 2nd page - you mention that it has Android 1.6, and then a couple of paragraphs down you seem SHOCKED that it's running Android 1.6 - who wrote this? A 6 year old?

You refer to the Streak having a lower resolution than the iPad? Well, maybe because the iPad is physically 4 times the size!!!

Next, you say it's too big to use as a phone? It's less than an inch longer than an iPhone - does that mean that the iPhone is also too big to use as a phone? Only if you actually ARE 6 years old, then every smart phone will be too big for your head :-P

Lastly is a little thing that you might want to do, it's called RESEARCH!
You see that large interface on the bottom, it's large for a reason - the Streak can plug into a dock which has a HDMI output. Can you expect to do that on any other smart phone? I think not!

Try taking into consideration the functionality that the Streak has that other phones don't have, and then you'll be able to review the item properly, instead of this half-asses "review", but you might have to do some RESEARCH first to do that properly, and Gods forbid you actually do that...

By PhilA on Friday Jul 16

This is a harsh review!

Maybe the reviewer looked at a prototype model, but this was a pretty harsh review in my opinion and the comparison with the iPhad is rather odd - this is a very different device and about half the size of the Apple tablet! I have been happily using my Dell for Satnav (google maps navigation), exchange push email, sending text messages and viewing office documents while on the move. It also makes for a really good web browsing experience compared to HTC smartphones that I've used. I've not experienced the 'sluggish' performance mentioned here at all. In fact, reviews usually mention how snappy and responsive the Streak is! I've certainly not had any problems with the speed of the device and I can easily multitask between reading emails and switching between multiple web pages using the browser. Text copy&paste works for me from the browser too. I'm really happy with my Dell and when the upgrade to Froyo comes later this year I will be able to enjoy Flash webpages too. However, except for the odd page which doesn't load fully due to limited flash support, this device already does everything I need. YouTube and BBC iplayer are both already catered for in separate free apps, for example. As a "Free on a £25/month contract" product, with a 3GB data allowance per month, it seems like really good value to me.

By Decimal on Thursday Jul 22