I’ve had the Dell Streak for a couple of weeks now so the review is not an unboxing.
Here is how it looks:
I’ve read a lot about the Streak online and it tends to be the same everywhere. Those who’ve never seen it don’t get it, those who see it like it, those who own it are always being asked about it.
For a phone it’s big, almost comedy size, but despite the ability to make calls on it the Streak is sold as a tablet. The interface is set up in landscape mode and you can buy a data-only tariff. I bought it outright and got a 30 day rolling data contract. Other options are available, including 18/24 month deals or SIM free from Dell. Keep reading below…
It ships with Android 1.6. Despite my love of Android I have to say that this is farcical. With 3.0 being tested and 2.2 rolled out on most high end phones Dell have really put their foot in it here, and I still don’t know why they did it. The stock answer is that when the promised 2.2 upgrade comes they want it to be just right. I think that’s baloney. since it is open source there is no cost incurred by using 2.2 so I don’t get it. It’s just another one of those barking mad things that makes Apple’s lead easier for Jobs to maintain. Luckily a2.1 O2 update was leaked online and I promptly installed it. The Streak was great on 1.6 but 2.1 is a quantum leap ahead, and it makes the device faster, more stable and better in every way.
So what do we get? The only real differences between 1.6 ad 2.1, aside from the OS itself are a couple of bespoke widgets for Twitter and Facebook. These are not in the 2.1 leak, but they are not really missed as they were not apps, they just displayed the news feed. Any tap on the widget took you to thewebsites so they were essentially RSS feeds. With 2.1 you get the Facebook and Twitter apps and they are fine, but I use something else that I will talk about later.
In the box is the unit, a drawstring case – replace immediately with a proper leather case – wall charger and lead. The Lead is USB out and the Streak itself has a proprietary charging port which looks to my amateur eye like an 18 pin. This is annoying and the reason they did it becomes clear when you try to buy a spare lead and find they are £19.99. Irritating but to be fair, Apple are as guilty, if not more of pulling this crap on users. When you hold the unit it is reassuringly weighted, solid and balanced and it is only 10 mm thick. It just feels right. Boot it up and you see that the screen is beautiful. This is why people who haven’t seen it don’t get it. The quality of the screen and the extra couple of inches really do make in instant impact. This device is different, and it feels great, pleasing the eye immensely. Pixel density is 800 x 480. Not quite iPhone’s retina, but it looks great. Pin sharp with vibrant, rich colours. Wallpapers look great, live wallpapers (animated scenes) look brilliant – further down you can see my aquarium wallpaper on a video demo.
As with all Android phones, you sign in to your Google account and all your data for contacts, calendar, app downloads and anything else stored on the cloud is pulled down to the unit. Apple’s Mobile Me is £59.99, Google do this for free. Strike one Google. I also think the Google method of having the cloud is better than plugging in to sync all the time. Apple is way off the pace there and wired sync only is, in 2010, not acceptable to my mind. Once accounts are done you can then sign in with other accounts like Facebook and Twitter, although multiple Google accounts only works on 2.1. That isn’t a big deal, but it is for me personally as I use a Google Apps account for my company, and the Google Market has some apps that need a personal account to work, one notable one being Google’s podcast client, Listen. I made do with Acast until I got 2.1, but no other client comes close to Listen so that irked me a bit.
Dell bundles a few apps with the Streak. Documents To Go comes with it, although editing needs a paid upgrade. With Google Docs I don’t see the point personally, but there we go. Also bundled is Touchdown, a business calendar app. Again, with Google Calendar it seems pointless. The only thing I can think is that 1.6 only allows one calendar, but multiple accounts on 2.1 allows as many as you like, and the beauty is that the data streams stay separate, but show up on the same screen, meaning that you can schedule your life properly but still not mix the two. I think this is a real bonus, especially if your boss is a dick, as they so often are. There is the usual music player, gallery, mail, basically all the things that make smartphones smart.
So on to the performance. This has a 1 Ghz processor, and boy do you feel it. Heavy use, multitasking, application switching. None of these fazed it. It st smiled and asked for more. I frequently have music playing, six screens full of widgets, live wallpaper, 10 or 11 applications running in the background. This unit did it with ease, No lag, no delay in functions, nothing. Everything is snappy, smooth and it NEVER crashes. The screen is very sensitive. It requires the gentlest of taps to function but seems to ignore brushes from cuffs etc. Very good indeed. The keyboard is great and I recommend you go one better and install either Swift Key or Swype. They improve the device significantly. There are three soft keys for back, menu and home.
Check out the voice controls here:
Pretty good eh? Also here, I picked the two silliest words I can think of:
I can’t even fool Google’s neural algorithms with ‘transubstantiation discombobulation’! It struggles a little with proper names, but that is not a surprise to me. As you can see, commands to navigate go immediately to the (excellent) navigation application. Nice touches there include street view when you arrive so you can see what you need to find, and it also automatically switches to night mode in darkness. Slick touches. Google Maps looks amazing on the 5 inch screen too.
The unit has 2GB onboard for applications. That is a hell of a lot – I haven’t come anywhere near it. It came with a 16 GB memory card and supports up to 32 GB. Since I use Spotify I don’t use the card to store music so 16 GB is plenty. Right now I have 4 films and the series’ Wonder of the Solar System, BBC Space and Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets loaded on the card so the storage is pretty big. Android only supports MP4, however, Rockplayer is an app that plays all the regular codecs, it’s free with ads or paid. The speaker is okay on the Streak and the bundled headphones are okay unless you’re a purist. The phones are also a hands free kit. The answer button also pauses and restarts playback. A simple addition that makes such a pleasing difference.
Live wallpapers look great on the display. I switch between the aquarium you can see above, and galactic core. Both are free in the Market, along with loads more.
Web browsing on the Streak is brilliant. The standard browser is great and the screen is large enough for full site browsing. With 2.1 you get tap and pinch zooming and the websites look great, colourful and vibrant. Panning and zooming are smooth and navigation is easy to the point of being addictive.
Despite Twitter and Facebook being in the Android build, I don’t use them as I I have discovered Tweetdeck beta. This is a brilliant app that combines your Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and Foursquare feeds in to one timeline. It makes using all four a breeze and they can be used together and updates sent to one, several or all of them as you see fit. As it is stil in beta you’ll have to get it from their site and install it manually, but it won’t be long before it appears in the market. Perfect.
Streak has two cameras. One five megapixel snapper with a twin LED flash and a front facing VGA for video calling. As yet it’s no use as Skype or Vonage haven’t got their finger out and built a video chat client. You can’t blame Dell. The hype surrounding the release of Streak has been substantial, so why the VOIP companies haven’t got an app ready to go is beyond me. With the arrival of more Android tablets imminent it’s hardly a risk to release software for Streak so I can only assume they don’t want to capitalise on the most profitable and fastest growing telecoms market, mobile tech.
The 2.1 update brought 720 pi HD video recording so the camcorder is top notch, and pictures from the camera look good, although it is very easy to blur them. Here is a Picase stream I snapped at the Edinburgh Fringe recently:
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| Edinburgh Fringe |
Pretty good I’d say.
Dell give you 6 screens to customise. I have one screen full of buttons for my frequent use apps. Two full of photo widgets so I can always be close to my family, and three with application widgets, with things like calendar, weather, tasks list, Spotify, Last FM, power control, Scoreboard, YouTube, Engadget, Taskiller and more. Sorry iFanboys, having used both iPhone and Android, I prefer widgets and customisation all day long.
Media sharing is pretty extensive. Photos can be sent to Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and Mail. Add to that any media app you install, just tap menu in the photo and you get your sharing option. Videos go to YouTube, although installing the free Qik app lets you share videos to the usual sites, Facebook, Twitter etc and Pixelpipe, also free, lets you share any media with just about every social network known to man, over 350 listed in the application. 2.1 brings a much improved gallery function to Streak too, smooth and easy to use rather than the raw functionality of 1.6. The navbar at the top consists of buttons rather than pull down menus. Left to right: applications, network status which doubles as recently used apps, notifications, then phone status which lets you switch flight mode and various connections on and off and gives battery status and the time and date too.
Battery lasts easily all day provided you have a task manager installed and use it to kill apps you’re not using. This is highly recommended as you can lose hours running programs you aren’t using – I am not exaggerating. Notifications can be customised not only phone-wide, but for each app, meaning you can have emails only vibrate, or just texts etc. Very useful.
There are also several e-book apps available, including Kindle. Naturally the screen is no match for e-ink, but it is good enough and sufficiently sized to make reading pleasurable. The Flixster application delivers movie trailers that look great, as does YouTube. YouTube allows you to turn high quality on or off. Unless you’re very worried about your data limit then go hi-def as lo-def looks truly atrocious. Blogging is a breeze with the keyboard size and sharing options, although epic posts such as this one are still best done on a PC. I have never found a phone that is up to that.
If you fancy gaming on this it will work very well, but you’ll need to learn a soft touch as it is easy to overload the screen – a sign of which is the colour blur on LCD screens. It’s easily done on the Streak.
The one thing people have been trying to do is decide what Streak is. I think that’s a bad idea. Just use it. It comes in to it’s own when the user is allowed to define it. I have used it heavily, and as soon as my contract on my other phone is up I’ll likely use it as my phone too. I have used it for media, films and music etc, social networking, emailing, navigation (an absolute life saver at the Edinburgh Fringe), blogging tool, camera, web browser, for shopping, eBaying, light gaming. It’s location awareness will become more and more useful. Location aware software will come of age over the next couple of years. The potential is obvious to current users. Maps, Navigation and suchlike are the beginning. Apps like Foursquare let you ‘check in’ at places and gie you discounts at places you regularly go to. Your favourite Costa Coffee or cinema probably does this now. Apps like Locale, which set your phone settings and state based on time and location are really useful and Google places, Flixster, Whereto and similar apps expose you to a world of places you never knew were there. I’ve already eaten great food and listened to great music and comedy as a direct result of using these apps, and the Gigbox app has sent me to various gigs by using my Last FM history to tell me when my favourite bands are in town.
To appreciate Streak you have to see it. On paper it’s odd and people don’t know what to do with it. Go and hold one, see the screen. It sits seemingly awkwardly between smartphones and iPad, and I confess I will be buying a full sized tablet running either Android or Chrome for home. That way I can keep my netbook for work. I think Streak is a surprise package. I love it and it’s easily the most useful phone I have used, ironically I don’t have a voice tariff either. It won’t convert iFanboys, but nothing would. If a person is willing to pay Apple’s price for a tablet lacking a camera, GPS, phone capability, which is locked, aggressively closed source and which is basically a massive iPhone that doesn’t phone then nothing will win them over. There is a reason that Android recently usurped Apple at number 2 in the smartphone OS market. Despite the hype, it’s better. It’s faster, cheaper, more suable, more customisable and the hardware is better. Apple likes to portray itself as the conquering hero of the market but it really isn’t, and picking up the Streak was the perfect antidote to my irritation at the iPad and it’s crap spec sheet and absurd price. I’m a mac user, and I like Apple, but I don’t like them that much. Streak is a winner. Plug in the hands free and you’re on the phone as usual. Hold it and the world comes to life.
great review. love my dell. easy to use, simple. it’s fun for games and business. my wife and daughter loves theirs and the wifi and gps are easy and great for my business. ya the size is a little big but w/e. also got our blackberry unlocking and and htc unlock codes for free! got our last couple streaks at unlockthatphone .com 2 thumbs way up