The full Dell Streak Review

Size certainly seems to matter, if you look at the number of huge smartphones that have recently appeared. The Dell Streak seems to be holding the midground between phone and tablet, offering 3G, Wi-Fi and five-inch touch-screen. But is it a jack-of-all trades rather than a master of either the phone or tablet market?

First impressions

Holding the Streak, it feels enormous. Its touch-screen, which measures five inches, is held in a glossy black chassis that is wider than the palm, yet it is just 10mm thick. Holding it in portrait orientation, it feels unwieldy, but it is perfect in landscape mode. This is what it's made for, as the home screens are set in landscape only. While there is an accelerometer, it won't work in most menus - which means most menus are portrait only. And when the accelerometer does work, it can be a tad over sensitive - a rotation lock would have been nice.

The capacitive, and very responsive touch-screen is almost as long as the handset. Set below it are just three touch-sensitive areas: home, menu and back options.

Flip the Dell over and you'll find a five-megapixel lens that features auto-focus and a slide-off back cover. Here, you'll also find the camera button, volume control and lock button. The USB charger slot is a wide one, like the iPad's, rather than the commonly seen microUSB charger slot. You can up the 16GB memory thanks to a microSD slot.

Android users will be surprised to see no dedicated search button: instead each app offers its own on-screen option, which may be hidden away in a menu. While only dedicated Android users will really notice the difference, it does lack a certain efficiency.

The Streak's OS is the rather elderly Android 1.6, but expect to be able to upgrade this to 2.2, whenever it is released. Dell has also included a simple, intuitive interface with a row of tabs at the top of each homescreen - these cover battery and network coverage, date and time, call and text notifications, and other alerts. Opened programs continue to run, as they do in all Android phones, and they can't be stopped until you download a specific task manager app. However, with its 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 512 RAM, we experienced no lags. And the battery life will impress too. With light use, it lasts for two full days, and you'll get a day out of it if you're running Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G.

It is possible to add shortcuts to as many as six screens, plus Android and Dell widgets. These include two plain but usable ones for Facebook and Twitter. What we didn't like was the way shortcuts are deleted - long-press, then hit the menu button and then delete - far simpler to be able to drag and drop to the trash can icon.

Call me

And so to the price tag. The Dell Streak can exclusively be obtained for free on contract with O2, but to use it on other networks you'll have to splash out £429 for a SIM-free handset. If you're just after a phone, the Streak is definitely too big, but as O2 will sell it with a data only plan as well as voice/data, it's plain it's being targeted at the tablet as well as the phone market. The dialler isn't really optimised for phone calls - instead of being able to type in the first few letters of a person's name, you have to actually dial the number or scroll through the phonebook. To get round this, you can create folders of contacts with phone numbers, or your favourite contacts, which can be easily accessed on the home screen.

The contacts book itself is excellent. Next to each friend, you'll find icons for text, call and email - if you have all those details. And sign into Facebook using the Dell widget and your friends and contacts will be merged, showing contacts with their Facebook profile picture. It's also possible to view custom contact groups or Facebook contacts only. There's also an option to manually merge contacts from the screen - if you have one person from Google, Facebook and your SIM card, for example - a facility not offered on other Android handsets.

We found voice dialling effective at recognising standard names, but non-English names posed a problem.

While the Dell Streak does have a front-facing camera, if you want to make video calls you'll have to download an app such as Fring, and if you're a Skype fan you'll have to wait - there is no Skype for app as yet, although one is rumoured to be due for release this year. It's a common problem for Android, with phones having the power but not being configured. So unless you're up for a bit of do-it-yourself, you may want to give it a miss.

The web and beyond

While it is possible to add any webmail account, you'll need another app to support Microsoft Exchange accounts. The TouchDown app also helps you sync contacts, calendar and email with Microsoft Outlook accounts that are not on the Exchange server. Having to go hunting for essential extras such as auto-complete and auto-capitalisation was a nuisance, despite the handset's fast and responsive keyboard. It should be a default option, or be accessible from the keyboard, surely? For those of us with smaller hands, holding the device in portrait is best, although the Streak's weight can make it hard to manage. Larger hands should go for landscape. Lay the device flat on a table and it is possible to type quite speedily with two fingers. You'll find handy dedicated number keys in both orientations.

The screen offers a comfortable viewing experience, and the Gmail app looks just as it does on a desktop, allowing the user to access to custom folders and a search facility. You'll find other email accounts such as Hotmail have a standard layout, while still offering the ability to access custom folders.

The full HTML browser can load non-mobile sites in about five seconds - that's twice as quick as other smartphones. It's easy to hit the right link, and you can zoom in and out of websites using multi-touch. Even at full zoom, text is clear and the autofit never allows it to run off the screen. It offers all the usual facilities of being online - you can add bookmarks, view browsing history and most visited sites, and share any webpage vial email or social networks. However, for a dedicated internet device, it's a shame not to see tabbed browsing.

Thanks to its lack of support for Flash Player (due to running on Android 1.6) it's not possible to play videos embedded in sites such as those from the BBC or The Guardian. YouTube videos are coded differently, so play fine. Streaming was smooth and we skipped ahead with a lag of only a few seconds. Once the Streak is updated to Android 2.2, it will offer support for Flash Player 10.1, so videos across the web will be accessible.

The display size is admirable for downloaded films, but it doesn't lend itself to YouTube videos and Facebook photos, which get stretched across the large screen. The TFT screen's brightness and clarity is noticeably inferior to the AMOLED screens of phones such as the Samsung Wave.

Finding the way

However, the large screen is great for navigation. The Streak has Google Maps preloaded, which includes routing and a places of interest feature. It's a shame that the ancient OS offers no support for Google's voice navigation feature or multi-touch in maps - to zoom in you'll need to use the on-screen buttons. We found the GPS fix fast and accurate when we used it all the way from London to Dorset. It was actually the 3G that held us back: maps didn't always download, even as the blue arrow depicting our car raced across the display. The digital compass is another plus - it was sensitive enough to turn straight away, even when we were walking in Central London.

You may not know that Android handsets can also act as ereaders. You'll find more and more ebook apps - many of them free - in Android Market. The couple we tried out were pretty basic. While they let you read in landscape and portrait orientation, only one page at a time is shown on the display. It feels like reading a text only webpage, while swiping across rather than down. One free app that has been recently launched and offers access to free and paid-for books is Kobo.

The Streak's five-megapixel camera takes average shots in ordinary daylight. It's not easy to use with one hand, because of the Streak's size, and we found spontaneous shots could be somewhat blurry. The shutter release takes a bit of pressure to work and, thanks to a slightly sluggish shutter speed, you need to hold it still for a second after taking your picture. However, for taking pictures to upload to Facebook and Twitter, it's fine.

The verdict on the Dell Streak

As a phone, the Dell streak is just too large. You'd need a pretty big pocket to fit it into. So, it's hard to envisage where it will sit in the market - is it a phone or a tablet - and why would you take a second phone out with you if you're using it as a tablet? However, consider it a portable media player that you can make calls with and it's a powerful, easy-to-use device. It's just a shame that Dell released the Streak with the old Android 1.6 OS. Once Android 2.2 is available, it will finally be possible to make the most of the Streak's top features.