Review: Dell Streak
August 26th, 2010 | by Mobile Data Group |Lately I’ve been feeling very self-conscious when talking on the phone in public, and it’s not because I’m worried about strangers listening in on my private conversations.
Rather, it’s because the mobile phone I’m using the just released Dell Streak. It is actually a touch screen tablet device that makes some of the clunkiest handsets from the late ’90s look diminutive by comparison.
The Streak (coming out later this year in Australia) is a complicated gadget. For a tablet computer, it is fairly small and thin, a fraction the size of Apple’s popular iPad. Its face is dominated by a touch screen that is 5 inches diagonally, compared with the iPad’s 9.7-inch display. Yet Dell insists it is also a phone, and as such it is fairly enormous and uncomfortable to talk on. Beyond that, it comes with an older version of Google’s Android software. Overall, it’s just too awkward to bear.
The Streak’s enormity is inescapable. It’s a little less than 6 inches long and 3 inches across, so it looked mammoth in my petite hands. I felt like a little kid holding her father’s smartphone.
It was clear from the start that carrying around the black gadget would be a chore. It fit into the back pockets of my jeans, but protruded noticeably. I was afraid it would fall out or be filched by some tablet-phone-hungry thief. As a result, I had to carry it in a bag or hold it in my hand if I wanted to lug it around, and this latter option quickly got old.