The Dell Streak - My Experience
This is something that I have wanted to write for a long time, but just never seemed to have time, with uni work and various other activities that I have been doing in my spare time.
Its basically now 6 months since I upgraded my mobile phone contract to the most powerful and amazing piece of kit in the world. The Dell Streak. Now I know what your thinking, and that’s probably Dell and Mobile Phone should never appear in the same paragraph. But its a marriage that Dell have worked very hard on and I feel the effort has payed off.
The Dell Streak, called the Mini 5 before release, is a 5” touchscreen
phone originally released in June 2010 in the UK exclusive to O2. I upgraded my phone contract, which was originally an iPhone 3G 16GB, a few days before iPhone 4 release to get the Dell, and I would never go back to an iPhone, even if Steve Jobs payed me his life salary. This is because I have completely fallen in love with Dell’s powerful piece of kit and Google’s Android Platform.
As a tech blogger, lets get the important bit out of the way and thats the Tech Spec of the Dell Streak. So the version I am running is the O2 locked Dell Streak 16GB. The phone itself has a 5” Touchscreen, a 1GHZ Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor, 512mb RAM, 512mb ROM, 2GB of non-accessible storage for the Android System and a 16GB Micro SDHC memory card inserted. It also has a 5MP camera with Dual LED flash and a front-facing VGA camera for video calling. Connectivity includes Wifi, HSPA, Quad Band GSM and Bluetooth. In terms of physical connectors the Streak makes use of the PDMI (Portable Digital Media Interface) and a 3.5mm Headphone Jack.
So as you can see the Streak boasts a large amount of impressive Spec. And in the rest of this post I will talk over my experience with the device and the Android Mobile OS platform.
Unboxing
When you first open the Box, the main thing that hits you is the incredibly sexy styling of the Dell. Under the couple of leaflets, your instantly hit by the glossy black LCD touchscreen and complementing glossy black side panels. It just looks like a well engineered piece of kit. And I would say it has a more striking style to the phone than that of an iPhone or other android devices. When you first take the device out of the box you also notice how light this large touchscreen device is. Coming in at 220g, its not much more than Apples iPhone 4 at 137g. After putting my sim card, the battery into the device and then booting the device up, you are instantly hit by the crisp colours of the 5” screen. The phone itself is very responsive to use, even on the older 1.6 (Donut) version of Anroid, and you get that feeling that this is the device for you. And you are not mistaken.
Inital Findings
The Android system is incredibly easy to get to grips with. Email addresses are a doddle to set up, contacts are easy to backup onto the Google servers and communication just works, surey the way smartphones should work. But you’d be suprised how many people have problems getting smartphones to do simple things like send emails. The thing with the Android system, is that a lot of the phone is already set up, and that after adding in your login to google, it all just works. One account gives access to the Android Market, Contacts, Calendars, etc. syncing, forgotten pattern lock credentials and much more. But the Dell Streak itself had a few bits that made it very annoying for me to use. One being the incredibly buggy Android 1.6. Being an older version of Android it was less stable than the then current 2.1. And Dell’s modifications to this system were far from perfect, with the keyboard getting on your nerves from not being 100% accurate no matter how many screen calibrations you applied to the phone through its hidden boot menu. But these were things I was prepared to put up with because of the extremly usable (when it worked) Android, and the benifit of the large 5” screen.
Android 2.1
In September 2010 O2 locked Dell Streak users saw the release of Android 2.1 (Eclair) as the first Over the Air update. It boasted a range of new features to add to the Dell, such as 720p Video recording, a modified Keyboard and improvements to the standard google apps such as maps where you could now use the pinch and zoom technique similar to that on the iPhone. This all sounded well and good, but for the large majority of Dell Streak users (I think the official figure was around 40% - 45%) ended up not being able to use there device as the update magically bricked the devices so they wouldn’t boot past the O2 logo, finally leading to O2 pulling the update on the Streak until Dell had fixed the problems with the update. Fortunatly for me, Android 2.1 installed successfully, be it wiping the phone of apps and settings, as well as stoping it syncing with the Dell PC Sync software. The modified keyboard was great, as it made the qwerty keyboard fill the width of the screen even in landscape mode, which made thumb typing fully possible again. But this update was still as buggy as the 1.6 system that came with the Streak, and this made me question whether the phone was worth me changing or whether I should have kept with iPhones. But I stuck with it and after a little while I saw that the problem was with Android 2.1 not closing apps as well as 1.6 did, so a quick install of Advanced task killer free fixed the problems, and I then had the best phone on the market. Or so I thought.
Android 2.2
In December 2010, the Dell Streak got its long awaited update to the official Android 2.2 (FroYo) system. This update has now made the Dell Streak the most powerful, and totally user friendly device on the Market, and why I frequently recommend all Android handsets running 2.2 (Including others such as the Samsung Galaxy S and the HTC Desire) over iPhones and Blackberry devices. Along with the official 2.2 update came the highly anticipated features such as Flash Player 10.1 built into the phone and the Swype Keyboard, but for the Streak it also brought along a modified User Interface called Dell Stage. This is a UI similar to that of the HTC Sense UI on all HTC devices, and makes the Streak even more user friendly. For example the Dell Stage widgets now fill up a whole page with useful features like the recent apps, favourite contacts and music widgets spread across the usual sliding interface. This makes it quicker to get to the apps, contacts and music that you use most often. A little somthing that I did get for the Streak was Dolphin HD Browser from the Android market to replace the standard browser. The main reason for this, is that the Dolphin browser will allow you to save valuable battery life by making Flash content on demand rather than auto loading. This means if you are on a page with a flash video and some flash adverts on it, the phone doesn’t render and play all of them, just the one you want, which you select by tapping it.
Overall
As I said at the start of this longer than expected post, I have had the Streak for just over 6 months of my 18 Month contract. Since getting the update to Android 2.1 the phone became much more usable once I had the task killer to clear vital RAM on the phone. And since getting the Android 2.2 update the user interface is so much quicker. So overall, as I think its pretty clear anyway, the Dell Streak is the best phone on the market by a long shot, as long as you don’t go with the common view that the screen is too big (Which it isn’t as it fits comfortably in any pocket). If I had my upgrade to my contract tomorrow I would probably just down my tariff to a Sim Only deal, as there isn’t a phone on the Market at the minute that I would want to go for over top of the Dell. In a few words it is simple to use, extremly powerful, and importantly a great looking and well engineered phone.
