Early Hands-On Preview of Dell's Streak 7 Tablet

MojoKid writes "Dell recently started shipping their Streak 7 tablet and it's the highly anticipated big brother of Dell's 5-inch tablet, the Streak 5 that came out in September of 2010. The larger Streak 7 goes up against stiff competition with the likes of Samsung's Galaxy Tab, though the Streak 7 is retailing slightly lower with or without a contract through T-Mobile. Regardless, the Dell Streak 7 offers some pluses over the Galaxy Tab, like its 5MP rear-facing camera, but comes up short in other areas, such as its lower resolution (800x480) display — versus the Galaxy Tab's 1024x600 display. The Dell Streak 7 also has NVIDIA's Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor under its hood for a rather snappy Android 2.2 experience, as you can see here in this early, hands-on preview of the device. In early benchmark testing, the Streak 7 is looking pretty strong versus the Galaxy Tab, which comes in neck-and-neck with the Streak 7 in Neocore, at around 54 FPS."

Battery life is crap

[alvinrod]

Engadget has a much better and more detailed review [engadget.com] of the device. They disliked the poor screen resolution and really dinged it for the abysmal battery life. The most they could get out of it was 6 hours if their usage was light.

Battery life with screen at 65% brightness, WiFi on, playing standard definition video.

Dell Streak 7: 3:26
Archos 70: 6:00
Samsung Galaxy Tab: 6:09
Archos 101: 7:20
Apple iPad : 9:33

The Galaxy Tab outclasses this thing in just about any conceivable manner.

Re:Rubbish

[alvinrod]

The OP is probably referring to phones. Here's an analysis [readwriteweb.com] of how long it's taken the various manufacturers to release updates. Samsung has taken roughly three times as long as either Motorola or HTC to get Froyo out. They've also been accused of withholding updates unless carriers paid them for it, but no one was able to confirm that for a certainty.

Based on their past history, I have a feeling that they won't be upgrading the Galaxy Tab to Honeycomb, but that's just my opinion. Sorry, but the data supports the OP's point of view. He may have an axe to grind, but he has plenty of justification.

Re:Pwns the galaxy S...

[t2t10]

With my iPad, it responds instantly to swipes and taps, the Galaxy seemed to be having serious problems responding to events - especially in its web browser. Yes, it's a cheaper device, but the specs are not far from the ones in the iPad.

Apple did a good job on optimizing specific applications, and they trade off memory and speed. That's a nice touch if you happen to run just a few Apple apps, but it only goes so far. Once you start using other apps and once multitasking comes into play, the iPad can hang and stutter with the best of them. (Also, a lot of the apps that you run on the Tab don't even come from Google, they come from Samsung.)

In practice, the Galaxy Tab works well; it isn't as sleek or polished or impressive as the iPad, but I find it actually a lot more useful.

Re:The real question...

[shellbeach]

This is what I think is stupid about android. It's touted as being "open" but you are left depending on the manufacturer of the device to upgrade the software. You should be able to download the software directly from Google and install it on any tablet.

Well, actually you can. The source code for Android is freely available [android.com], and you can literally roll your own. That's exactly what's been going on with heaps of Android phones right now, that are happily running Gingerbread long before the manufacturers have even thought about releasing an update.

Where the model falls down, though, is in the hardware drivers -- for my phone, an HTC Desire, developers are still waiting on Google's long-promised-but-never-delivered OTA update to the Nexus One in order to grab the proprietary hardware drivers for the device. Don't misunderstand me -- everything works right now, and very well too -- but not quite as well as it might with the proprietary drivers.