The Dell Streak Review

The Streak’s Tablet Customizations, Not Enough

If you buy a Streak in the US today it will ship with Android 1.6 on it. Dell is promising an update to 2.2 (Froyo) before the end of the year, but until then you get to use 1.6 - originally released in 2009. The older Android OS revision sets the tone for much of my experience with the Streak. The hardware is well executed, but what we're missing is on the software side.

Dell’s customized home screen is nice. As is the case with all Android devices the home screen doesn’t rotate. While on most phones that means you get a portrait home screen, on the Streak you get a landscape one. It works.

You get four screens by default and along the top of the UI you have a number of useful tabs. The first is your app dropdown list. By default you get six icons for your frequently used apps, a list you can customize. Hit the more arrow and you’ll see a grid arrangement of all of your apps.

Moving on, we have a switcher tab. It’s labeled with your carrier’s name, in this case AT&T, but tap on it and you can add home screens, close them or switch between recent applications.

Next we have the standard notifications tab. Unlike other Android phones you don’t drag this one down to expose it, just tap.

And finally there’s a status tab. Tapping on this one will show you any alarms set, battery status, and let you enable/disable all wireless connections individually. The status tab is very well implemented and very convenient. My only complaint is that it doesn’t appear instantaneously when you select it.

This is an Android phone so you can populate each home screen with widgets, shortcuts or Folders. The icon style isn’t bad, just not as modern as possible in my opinion.

Some apps have been redesigned to take advantage of the Streak’s larger screen and the likelihood that you’ll want to use it in landscape mode. The dialer works in landscape mode, something that isn’t true of standard Android phones. In landscape mode you get a dialpad to your right and call log to your left.

The Phone app in portrait

The Phone app in landscape

The address book also works in landscape. Here you get individual buttons for all of the methods you have of contacting a specific entry (e.g. dedicated buttons for mobile phone, work phone, SMS and email). It can save a screen tap.

Contacts in portrait

Contacts in landscape

This is Android 1.6 so multitouch gestures aren’t supported in the Google Maps app. You can only double tap to zoom or use the zoom in/zoom out buttons on the screen. The pinch and stretch gestures don’t work.

Unfortunately the customizations that Dell has introduced on the Streak aren’t enough to make this device a pocketable iPad. A couple of years ago I wrote a story about HP trying to become more Apple-like. In it I said the following:

“The problem that plagues the Dells of the world however is that they don't control the software stack the way Apple does, they are still at Microsoft's mercy.
...
HP noticed this same Microsoft dependency issue, just like the rest of the PC OEMs and over the coming years you're going to see companies like HP and Dell become more like Apple, offering systems as complete packages of hardware and software solutions. We'll see broader adoption of Linux and open source software and finally some out of the box thinking.”

And now it’s very clear why HP, not HTC, was the company to buy Palm. HP needed Palm and webOS to not necessarily replace Microsoft or Google, but at least give it the option to.

Dell doesn’t have that. And to make matters worse, on a device like the Streak we do need more custom rolled software to take advantage of the larger screen size. On the iPad we got slight modifications to the mobile Safari and Mail apps that made them more pleasant to use on the larger screen. The same goes for the iBook app. As much of a gimmick as it may be at first glance, the page turning animation in Apple’s iBook app is sorely missed on the Streak.

Instead what you get is a large Android phone. And unfortunately, that’s not what makes a good tablet. I want more customization, down to the app level and I want it to be good. There’s no reason for me to have to tap twice to open a new browser window when you’ve got a 5” screen.