Dell Streak review

Review

2010-07-14 17:10

We love the screen, we like the hardware, and Dell makes a fine first stab at making Android work in slate form — but until the Streak runs Android 2.2, we can’t recommend it.

The Dell Streak's home screen, when supplied by O2. Press the arrow at the top left to reveal all the

It may only weigh 220g, be dressed in sober black and have attracted a micro-fraction of the attention of the Apple iPad, but don’t be fooled: Dell’s pinning a lot of its hopes on this humble-looking device. While we haven’t been blown away by its powers, the Dell Streak has an undeniable charm all of its own.

The charm stems in large part from its physical design. A 5in screen dominates, with a thick black bezel on either side. If you were feeling unkind you might deride it as an overgrown phone, particularly when held in a vertical position, but for the majority of the time you’ll be holding the Streak in landscape mode, and in that orientation it starts to look quite neat.

Unlike the Apple iPad with its chic minimalism, Dell dots a number of buttons around the Streak’s edge. The three most important sit to the right of the screen: Home, Menu and Back. Menu is context-sensitive, showing commands like Wallpaper when on the home screen and Voice Dial when in the phone app.

At the top (which becomes the right-hand side if you do decide to put the Streak to your ear and use it as a phone) you’ll find the volume up and down buttons, the power switch, a 3.5mm audio jack and the camera button. The bottom is home to the proprietary connector, which is how you link up with your PC and recharge the device.

The software

As has been well advertised, Google Android powers the Streak. But prepare yourself for disappointment: this isn’t Android 2.1 but 1.6. That means you lose out on native multitouch support and support for Adobe Flash.

Which you miss the most will depend on how you use the Streak. The lack of Flash means you can’t watch videos on PC Pro’s website, for instance, or the BBC’s videos for that matter. No native multitouch isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: most of the other key apps, most notably the web browser, do support it.

One app that doesn’t, however, is Google Maps, and that’s a much bigger limitation. Not being able to pinch to zoom means you have to rely on the on-screen zoom-in and zoom-out buttons, which slows things down.

Initially, it seems as if the Streak also omits turn-by-turn navigation (and we must admit to not realising this until "streaky" and "thewelshbrummie" pointed out the error of our ways in the comments below). But that's not true: download the voice synthesizer and activate GPS in the Security & location settings, and this feature will magically appear.

That’s a huge relief: as the lead feature in this month’s issue of PC Pro clearly shows, Google’s free satnav offering is superb if you just need a fuss-free way to get from A to B.