Dell Streak Review & Specifikations

BUILD & DESIGN

This may sound odd, but how large the Streak is depends on how you classify it. If you consider it a smartphone, it's really big. On the other hand, if you think of it as a tablet computer, it's very small.

In concrete numbers, it's 6 x 3.1 x 0.4 inches (153 mm x 79 mm x 10 mm).

That makes it small enough to go easily into a pair of cargo pants -- something that's never going to happen with an Apple iPad. On the other hand, it weighs enough that you're not likely to forget which pocket you have it in.

Screen
The centerpiece of the Dell Streak is its 5-inch, 800 x 480 pixel (WVGA) capacitive touchscreen.

This largedisplay allows you to get more done with this device than you would on a smaller smartphone. It makes web browsing better, emails easier to read, and is a blessing for watching video and reading ebooks.

Colors are great, and thisscreen offers a wide range of viewing angles, so it's possible for two people to watch a movie together.

Itisn't too bad a fingerprint magnet -- it's no worse than any other item you regularly rub your fingers on.

KeyboardThe Streak doesn't have a physical keyboard, but its large display gives plenty of room for an on-screen one. There's room for all the commonly used punctuation marks to have their own keys, and there's a dedicated number area.

In most apps you have a choice of a landscape and aportrait version of the virtual keyboard, The landscape oneis definitely better, but the portrait version is still usable.

I wouldn't want to write a novel on this keyboard, but it's quite good enough for emails and texting.

Other Buttons & ControlsThis Dell model has been designed to primarily be used in landscape mode, though most of its features can be used in portrait mode.

Built into the touchscreen are the Home, Menu, and Back buttons. These are large and easy to use -- a good thing, as they are the three most frequently used buttons on any Android OS device.

Along the top (or the right side in portrait mode) are the Power button, Camera button, Volume Up/Down rocker, and the 3.5 mm headset jack.

On the bottom is the Streak's combination data and power port. The device comes with a cable you plug into this port to recharge or to synchronize with your PC.

You also use this port with the HDMI port for viewing HD TV, but I was unable to test this feature, as Dell did not supply me with the required HD dock.

Dell's decision to create its own port rather than use standard ones was a real mistake. You can't connect any cables to this smartphone besides Dell's own, a real inconvenience for frequent travelers.

Camera
This tablet phoneincludes a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera on its back, and a front-facing one for video conferencing.

The rear-facing camera takes fairly decent pictures. Most of the ones I took came out looking fairly good.

The Streak has an LED flash, but it's quite weak. In my tests, it wasn't capable of making a dimly lit object close to the camera bright enough for a good picture.

This device comes with a nice addition from Dell: a set of image editing tools. It's not Photoshop by any stretch of the imagination, but you can sharpen, crop, resize, and make other tweaks.

The front-facing camera is clearly intended for video conferencing, but the Streak does not come with any software that can handle this.

Dell Streak Specifications

• Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• Full phone functionality
• 5″ 16M-color TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen of WVGA (800 x 480) pixel resolution
• Android OS v1.6 (Donut) with nicely customized homescreen
• 1GHz Snapdragon CPU
• 512 MB of RAM, 2GB internal storage
• microSD slot, 16GB card included in the package
• 5 MP autofocus camera with smile detection and geotagging
• VGA video recording at 30fps
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g support
• GPS with A-GPS; Digital compass
• Accelerometer, ambient-light and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Stereo Bluetooth v2.0
• 10mm slim profile, impressive build quality
• Office document editor
• Secondary video-call camera
• Swype predictive text input
• Very good speaker performance