Reviews

Dell Streak review

The Dell Streak is the first in a stream of Android tablets to appear on the market. We review it to see if it’s in the same league as the Apple iPad

14 Jul 2010

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The keyboard layout will be familiar to everyone it's more like a computer keyboard than on any other device and makes typing emails a breeze.

The browser makes the most of the screen too, and although it's not as impressive as looking at non-flash web pages on the Apple iPad, it has a fair go, and pages can be read without zooming in at all.

There's no flash support on the Streak, which is disappointing, but that's no surprise as Flash Lite isn't one of Android 1.6's native features.

Multitouch allows you to pinch to zoom in and out of web pages, although you can't double tap to zoom into a story, or long press to copy/paste sections of text.

You can save images from web pages, but that's about the functionality of the browser done.

What does become annoying on the whole of the Dell Streak, especially the browser, is its speed. It's so sluggish, you could even be fooled in thinking our review sample was a prototype. But it's not.

Despite Dell packing in a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz processor, it just doesn't seem to be enough to power the device.

When swiping around the web pages, there's an obvious delay. There's also a delay when switching between the home screens something we've never experienced on a premium smartphone.

Dell has lightly applied its UI over the Android 1.6 OS. Yes, that's right, the Dell Streak runs Android 1.6, which means no Exchange support, no HTML5 support and no live wallpapers.