Dell Streak 7

 The Dell Streak 7 is the follow-up to the company's Sin model. Although the design of the original Streak didn't impress, design is the 7's biggest asset. It's not that the new version is especially slim or stylish; rather, its build quality, button placement and subtle contours are appealing.

Even the port cover is well designed: it's sturdy but not bulky, and it smoothly fits with the edge. It provides easy access to the full size SD card slot and the SIM card slot. The three navigation buttons

- one each for back, menu, and home

- are aligned at the right in landscape mode. The positioning is offset, which means your palm won't accidentally
 
invoke the capacitive touch buttons when you're holding the device.

Regrettably, design elements alone don't guarantee a tablet's usability. For example, Dell has said that it will offer Android 3.0 on the Streak 7 in the future, but for now you get it with Android 2.2.

Unlike Samsung and its TouchWiz interface, Dell has done little in the way of customising its Android build. Everything is stock Android, except for the home screens, which have Dell's Stage user interface. Here, it provides some potentially useful home screen widgets grouped around content type (Home, Mail, Social, Music and Web, with two customisable). Mail shows  your most recent emails, while Social provides hooks into Facebook and Twitter. While appealing, the implementation leaves much to be desired, for example, the Mail widget constantly requested an email address.

The mediocre capacitive multi-touch screen is another sore spot. The 800x480 resolution display is a huge disappointment. Images looked washed out and lacked punch

SLOW TO RESPOND

What really holds the Streak down, however, is its apparent bugginess. The screen on our test model was unresponsive on several occasions, for instance. The unit also froze when trying to open several apps downloaded from the Android Market, which could be due to bugginess in the Streak 7 or how Android 2.2 deals with those apps. But in all cases, the apps did just fine on the Galaxy Tab yet they struggled on the Dell.

The 5Mp rear-facing camera (with LED flash) also didn't live up to expectations as it felt awkward to use and produced poor quality images.

The on-screen keyboard was responsive, and conducive for two-handed thumb typing in the vertical
position, but the Swipe button was often inadvertently activated when holding the device in this orientation.

VERDICT

Dell's Streak 7 counts smart design among its strengths, however, its unimpressive display and poor software implementation constrain its appeal.


Details

Price £399inc VAT  
Further information www.dell.com/uk
Specifications Android 2.2, 1GHz dual-core T20 nVidia Tegra; HSPA + @ 2100/1900/AWS/850; 7in WVGA 800x480-pixel display; 1.3Mp front-facing camera, 5Mp rear-facing camera; H.263/H.264, 3GP, MPEG4, WMV, MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+. AMR, MIDI, WAV; Full HTML WebKit browser, Adobe Flash 10.1; 16GB of internal storage; Support for up to 32GB additional storage using the user accessible SD, MMC, SDHC memory card slot; Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n; Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR; 199.9xll9.8x 12.4mm; Dell Stage 1.0; GPS; 439g