The Dell Streak 7, a tablet that is marketed as a potent product to work, but also to play, watch video and “be watched” in video calls. The Streak 7 is also presented as an accomplished eReader and an overall multimedia device to consume music, photo and the web. Dell has always recognized that the smaller Streak 5 is an “experiment” in terms of form factor and usage model, but the 7” version goes head to head with the iPad, the Galaxy Tab and other tablets.
Dell Streak 7: Design
The Dell Streak 7 has a clean design. It is plain and feels a bit “plastic” (especially in the back), more so than the Samsung Galaxy Tab for instance. Unlike other devices, this one has only three Android buttons: Home, Menu and Back. The Android buttons are odly placed if you use the Tablet right-handed and horizontally: your thumb lands right where the buttons are and it’s actually easier to simply rotate it by 180 degrees and hold it from the opposite side. It works great, maybe except if you use the webcam. Even then, I tend to find the Streak 7 to be a two-hands device, despite its relatively small size (when compared to the iPad). With a single hand, it feels heavier than it looks, so keep this in mind.
Dell Streak 7: Display
The Dell Streak 7 display size, is decent, but if you have been playing with smartphones and tablets, you will see right away that the resolution is relatively low for a 7” screen. At 800×480, you basically get the same resolution than most (recent) 3.5”/4.3” smartphones, except that the image is now 7” big!
The display has a poor viewing angle. If I put the Streak 7 on my desk, the bright image that I’m looking at becomes barely visible, and all but the brightest parts of the image went dark. In a outdoor setting, things get really tough. Unlike e-paper, any backlit screen (LCD, OLED…) is hard to read in direct sunlight, but this one is particularly hard to read in such conditions. If you plan to use it outdoors, or in a very bright place, this could make things very difficult.
Dell Streak 7: UI
If you hold it vertically, the Streak 7 has a user interface that is very close to most Android smartphones that you might have played with. There’s not much news on that side. Because the Streak 7 uses the Tegra 2 “system on a chip” (SoC)s from NVIDIA, I was expecting a very fluid user experience, but the streak 7 doesn’t feel faster than most Android devices that came out in the past 12 months.
When used horizonally, the Streak 7 displays bits of informations on the left+right sides, but you can’t interact with that content without scrolling to either side. It would have been nice to get the equivalent of two more icon columns on either side. I’ll survive though.
Dell Streak 7: Multimedia
Tablets are supposed to be excellent media consumption devices, so I did a few things like reading books/news, watch video and listen to music. The results are mixed and you can have different views depending on what you care the most: absolute quality or mobility. The absolute media consumption quality is definitely not as good as on an iPad. Videos are not as sharp, neither are the eBooks. Of course, the Dell Streak 7 is smaller.
Dell Streak 7: Productivity
When it comes to productivity, the central nerve is the (virtual) keyboard, and I have to say that on a bigger screen, Swype rocks! If you are not familiar with Swype, it is a virtual keyboard with which could can “swipe” from one letter to the next instead of tapping. It is more accurate because your finger stays on the screen surface the whole time. With “tapping”, most typos happen because your finger “lands” on the wrong spot – Swype takes that away. It’s not perfect though, as Swype relies heavily on a dictionary, so if you tend to use slang or words that are not in the dictionary, Swype might not help as much.
From a productivity standpoint, the lack of pixel real-estate and decent copy/paste capabilities can be fairly annoying if you use it often. Overall, I see the Dell Streak 7 productivity as being close to a smartphone, except that typing is much faster.
Dell Streak 7: Web Browsing
Web browsing is very good, just like it is on most recent Android devices. The version 2.2 of Android used the Dell Streak has in-browser support for Flash. You can go to Flash sites (some industries rely heavily on Flash) and even play casual Flash games, although most of them are built for desktop machines and rely on a mouse or a keyboard. In horizontal mode, even small characters are readable (which is not the case on a 4” smartphone display using the same resolution), so that works fairly well if you have a good sight. In vertical mode, you’ll have to zoom in because things get minified.
Dell Streak 7: Gaming
Playing with the Streak 7 feels good as games are more immersive than on smartphone. Unlike iPad versions of iOS games, these are the exact same than the ones running on Android phones. 3D games run fast, just as fast as other devices equipped with the same Tegra 2 1GHz chip. Don’t expect higher performance because there’s more room for cooling in the tablet format.
Dell Streak 7: Performance
As the Gaming section indicates, overall performance is among the best that you can get on Android. The Dell Streak 7 runs just a little slower than the LG Optimus 2X, the first dual-core smartphone equipped with the same chip. Overall, the application performance should be very similar, so I don’t expect any trouble.
I was a little surprised to see that the user interface of the Streak 7 is perceptibly slower than the LG Optimus 2X’s. I’m not sure why that would be, but the user interface scrolling feels a little sluggish, and slower than the 2X. That said, the Galaxy Tab doesn’t do that much better in that regards so if you want Android 2.2, that might simply be the price to pay.
Dell Streak 7: Battery Life
The battery life depletion varies a lot depending on what you do, but for example, if you play games, things can go downhill fairly fast: leaving Raging Thunder ( a car racing game) in “demo mode” for 30mn used 19% of the battery, which means that you could play it for about 2.5 hours before you need to plug again – take this as a worst-case scenario. If you just browse the web or read a book, the battery life will be much better, but it won’t reach what you can get on an iPad (about 10 hrs of video, etc…).
Conclusion:
The Dell Streak 7, like the the original Dell Streak, is a smartphone masquerading as a tablet. That is not, on the whole, a bad thing: you get some of the best features of Android in a form-factor that is more conducive to media consumption. However, the Streak 7 is worrying because it launches on the cusp of another Android version, 3.0, that promises a more unified tablet UI. Provided this device will keep up with the times over the next few iterations of Android, I’m all for recommending it as a sturdy and slight Galaxy Tab or iPad alternative for the media enthusiast.
COMMENTS