Dell Streak Review

1. Introduction2. The Dell Streak (overview)3. The Dell Streak (Display quality)4. The Dell Streak User Interface (1)5. The Dell Streak User Interface (2)6. System Performance7. The Streak Camera8. Battery Performance9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

While there will obviously never be Apple iTunes store support, you can purchase MP3's directly from Amazon –  the prices are much the same as Apple's client, but the system is not as intuitive. Apple still have the edge here.

The Maps program is brilliant and it really comes in useful on the move as you can program GPS related searches and route directions. It can be a little sluggish but this is to be expected on such a device. Sadly in Android 1.6 multitouch gestures are not supported in Google Maps so you have to double tap to zoom or use the zoom in and out buttons on the screen. No gestures or pinching allowed until the next release.

Dialing and the address book are connected to lovely, big keypads which make dialing a pleasure. These also work in portrait as well as landscape however obviously the sizes will adjust to suit the physical screen dimensions.

Browsing the net proved to be as easy as I had expected with the 1GHZ processor making easy work of the KitGuru website and other more intensive sites, such as Youtube.

Playback performance with video content is first class, although this display has a tendency to really make sub standard upload videos look even worse.

Quick Office is supplied for handy document support on the move – although we find on screen keyboards only suitable for very small amounts of work. It becomes rather painful over longer durations, even on an iPad with a 9.7 inch screen.

Facebook and Twitter are supported via the far left ‘home' page, both accounts are configurable here and a quick overview shows both side by side, ideal for a hard core social networking user.

Below I have included some shots of the various configuration panels – almost everything can be tweaked and adjusted to suit personalised desires and we lost many an hour tweaking the interface. The only bad thing I would say about the Streak is that Dell are relying too much on the open source network for further application support – for instance there are no customised Mail and iBook applications which we love on the iPad. We also found that the video player supplied won't handle many of the lesser known movies file formats and instead you are expected to download third party players to take advantage of wider file support. Not ideal.

Become a Patron!