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

The Streak has been an interesting product to review and we walk away feeling that Dell have gotten most of it right. Browsing the internet is much easier than on an Apple iPhone and the experience is significantly improved thanks to the additional physical real estate. The benefits also include having a larger touch screen to work with … making SMS, email and internet browsing much easier. Especially if you have big hands, like myself.

From the point of view of ergonomics and screen quality I don't think you will get much better than this – the Streak is thin enough to carry around all the time and its just big enough to enjoy a movie or to watch Youtube clips without feeling shortchanged. The call quality and user interface is also very impressive.

The battery life knocked us out, we managed to last three or four days with light general use (some phone calls, a few texts and some random email checking) and if you leave it inactive with Wi-Fi enabled we managed to almost get a full week out of it, which is even better than our long life Nokia E71.

Negatively we find that performance is unfortunately a little lacking in places, even though it ships with a snappy (on paper) Qualcomm 1GHZ processor. Android 1.6 is in clear need of an update and thankfully this is coming before the end of the year with V2.2.

The camera operation and quality borders on sub standard. People who only look at figures and see “5MP” will wonder why everything tends to look slightly out of focus with skewed saturation and out of balance colour. Video quality is also abysmal.

Overall however, when we balance all the pros and cons, if you can live without the camera and don't mind the occasional slow down when browsing some webpages then this is a great product with a sharp screen and beautiful appearance. Just be prepared to deal with some unusual looks when you answer this rather large phone in public places.

KitGuru says: Dell have managed to deliver a well rounded product, but we want to see Android OS 2.2 released very shortly to fix some of the issues.

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