Review: Dell Streak | Charles Epres, Creative Creature in Dubai

A lazy work afternoon somehow got spiked with excitement when my boss dropped me an email with a postscript at the bottom saying: we are getting a demo unit of the Dell Streak today, want to have a go at it? Dell Streak? As in the iPad killer from the PC makers? This is gonna be very interesting. Without so much as a blink, I immediately replied a resounding yes and zoomed to the office to pick it up in its boxed glory. I have 48 hrs to check it out, so I better make it worth my time.

THE UNBOXING
The package for the Streak is nothing to be awed at but what struck me was the size of it, being a little bigger than a normal box for a cheapo Nokia phone. Heck, the box of the N97 was way bigger than the Streak’s. Obviously, the Streak didn’t need a large box as the device itself is small, maybe even a bit too small for tablet standards. But we’ll come back to that later.

The package contains the usual accessories: charger, headset, manuals & sync cable. Dell also managed to throw in a protective case as well as a 16Gb MicroSDHC card. Nice.

THE LOOKS

Dell did their homework on this one and the Streak is definitely a looker of a tablet. With its nicely contoured profiles and curves, you would almost think this was an Apple device until you touch it and feel its actually made up of plastic. Its not apparently, the device is made out of lightweight aluminum and coated with heavy layers of paint, but the lingering feeling that it is cheap is somewhat there.

The screen is crisp and bright, perfect for indoor browsing but the glossy surface makes it impossible for anyone to use it under direct sunlight. It’s not heavy as well, it doesn’t feel very substantial in your hands but I assure you that its a handful. Overall, I think this is a device that you get rough with and not care about the scratches at the end of the day.

THE HARDWARE

If you’re reading this and up until now you’re not sure what the Dell Streak is then I don’t understand how you got to this point. But anyway, the Streak is Dell’s answer to Apple’s iPad and maybe even a more ambitious one at that.

Apple has two distinct devices right now, the iPhone and the iPad, and then Dell snuck them out, brought them to a cheap motel and 9 months later out comes their prodigal offspring, the Streak.

Way smaller than an iPad ( with a 7 inch capacitive touchscreen) but way bigger than the iPhone, the 1Ghz Snapdragon powered Streak also inherits both devices’ key abilities: making calls and a tablet form factor, all while running the fastest growing mobile OS in the market today, Google’s Android.

Dell also made sure to cover all bases by dropping in a front-facing camera, a 5-mega pixel rear camera, HDMI output, stereo speakers and expandable memory via a micro SD slot, all while retaining the usual bells & whistles in a smartphone. You’re probably thinking ‘wow, this is a marvelous device’ and yes you may be correct to a certain point but let me continue.

THE EXPERIENCE

When I tested the Streak, it made sense to combine the tablet form factor and the phone functions as, essentially, these are the only capabilities that separate the iPhone and the iPad. Having them all in one device means less weight to lug around, less cables, less protective covers to buy and less screens to wipe. The OS as well is snappy, much like Apple’s iOS but with a slew of improvements under its belt. It made perfect sense.

It didn’t occur to me though that there was another big difference in those two devices: the screen, and it made me realize how one was perfect for certain tasks while the other was perfect for another set of tasks. Yes, yes, the Streak hit the sweet spot in between those two devices in terms of screen real estate but then again, it also means it’s not specialized to do any of the tasks the iPad or iPhone was meant to do.

Imagine typing a whole blog post (like this one) on a Streak while you’re at a mall lounging at your local coffee shop. Its not an easy feat, specially that they managed to cram in a number pad on the right side of the already small screen. The feedback of typing on it was great but somehow my fingers looked out of place trying to type with two thumbs, let alone two hands, on it.

Ok, so how about another task like email? Reading emails on a Streak is a pleasant experience and setup was a breeze. I specially liked the fact that you can place widgets on one of the home screens to notify you in one glance if you’ve got mail. But then again, trying to reply to an email is a tedious task. In fact, anything that relates to typing on that tiny keyboard is tedious. The keyboard became so annoying that the iPhone’s keyboard actually felt better to type on. It also did not help that the keyboard had other smaller characters on it on the right side which again did not make sense. I want to hit a key that shows me what exactly I’m going to get when I hit it, not a key with two different characters on it which I’m not even sure how to get.

And to my Arab friends, my test unit came with US specs meaning it had no Arabic built-in. Not even on the browser itself. If this unit is the actual selling unit for the UAE then the locals need to get used to reading boxy characters on the browser.

I’ve made my point with the keyboard but how about calls? To be honest, I thought it was quite cool to brandish a test unit of the Streak and make calls with it in a busy coffee shop. But sticking a massive device like this on your face isn’t really very impressive and all I got were weird stares. Add to this the fact that the screen kept trying to light up while I was on a call, continually lighting up my face unnecessarily. If this is a bug, I will not know, but I’m sure the sensor is having trouble trying to identify if a face is near the screen or not.

Call quality as well was so-so and my friend said my voice faltered at times. This may be because this thing is so massive, it covers a lot of your face and you keep trying to get that right position where the earpiece is level with your ear and the end of the device is nearest to your mouth, which you cannot achieve since its a gigantic phone. I guess the only way to spare yourself this humiliation is to use the headset it came with or get a wireless one and pretend you’re on a space mission of some sort.

There’s also this small bug that for some reason, doesn’t let you display the homescreen in portrait mode. Definitely doesn’t help.

THE APPS

The Streak came bundled with its own Facebook app and it was readily identified by Facebook when I did a status update with it. Sweet. But yes, as you may have imagined, the app was surprisingly useless. Other than show you status updates of some of your friends on the home screen, it did nothing else. Once you click on one of the updates, it takes you straight to the browser and then to the Facebook mobile website. How is that better than say, actually launching Facebook from the browser yourself?

The Streak also came with a YouTube app, QuickOffice, Google Maps, an Amazon MP3 Store app, Android Market app and the usual barrage of utilities such as a calendar, calculator, alarm clock, sim management apps, etc.

And oh, almost forgot, at the time of this writing, the Streak had no apps available for it on the Android Market. Don’t forget, this is a tablet, not just a phone, so all the present phone apps there right now will not be compatible with the device. So if you’re planning to tweet about your shiny new device, you’re out of luck. Yep, the Streak is starting to get lonely.

THE VERDICT

I like the Streak, I really do. Dell hit all the right buttons on this one. But in my gadget-filled existence, I find it hard to tell myself that this device can replace both my iPad and my phone. The screen size for me is questionable, a case of OK at everything but not the best in any task. The keyboard is such a failure that its the one thing I would beg Dell to replace.

Should you buy it?

If you don’t have a tablet or an iPad and want to make a productivity jump from a normal phone, the Streak is a very good choice and it makes perfect sense to have an in-betweener device. For a starter tablet, the Streak will do wonders for you specially when the Android Market opens up to it.

If you don’t have a tablet or an iPad, own a smartphone and want to be able to do more, the Streak is a very capable device and is probably the best there is in the batch of just-launched tablets. If you have an iPhone, jumping to Android would maybe seem a bit weird and you would sorely miss the apps. Again, the Streak will only be saved once developers start launching apps for it.

If you have an iPad and a smartphone, actually use them both for productivity and you’re trying to look for a better alternative, the Streak is a good attempt at cracking the iPad market but I feel that its still too raw to be launched specially in this part of the world to compete with the iPad. For a power-user and a gadget-freak, the Streak will simply be an eye-candy in the beginning, lose its appeal and eventually fade out into the bottom of your gadget drawer.

Will I buy it? Since I have an iPad and an iPhone, I’d find it very hard to replace the two devices with something that I feel is still in the development stage. Up until the Android Market opens up to tablet platforms, the Streak is going to be nothing more than a fancy digital novelty. But now, its hard to beat the flexibility and usability of the iPad and the iPhone with its backing of 150,000 apps.

The below sums up my review of the Dell Streak:

THE GOOD