Early Hands-On Preview of Dell's Streak 7 Tablet 96
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by
timothy
from the maybe-it's-the-year-of-linux-on-the-tablet dept.
from the maybe-it's-the-year-of-linux-on-the-tablet dept.
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."
Specs Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Power drain appears to be drastic.
Screen rez being lower than the Tab is going to be annoying.
And releasing a 2.x version device NOW when if they'd wait a couple of weeks they could do 3.0?
Then again, the Tab was nobbled by not allowing regular voice calls in the US.
But at least it's price is better, but overall a lesser experience when Android Tab makers should be aiming far higher.
Dell, what are you doing?
How to make a decent 7" Android Tablet /think/ of less on a 10" device.
Tegra appears to work well. Don't be afraid of standardising on it.
Latest version of Android, whatever version that is.
Full Bluetooth support so we can pair up devices
HDMI output so we can use it with bigger screens if we want to.
Speaking of HDMI port, if you need to use a non-standard port then split out the hdmi? well, if you have to, but make a standard USB port too for us to charge/connect upto.
Voice calling as an option, not limited. Let me choose to pay a phone company 50 bucks a month and make you more money, don't limit us
Standard Android UI, no motoblur/horrible stuff we only load a newer launcher over anyway
1024x600 at least (Tab's display really is bright and clear. Should be the bare minimum rez for future devices, 7" at least, and don't even
Decent speakers (again, the Tab does pretty good here)
Clean edges. Glass fronted. Tab/Ipad/Streak, cover the full front of the screen. Not try and jam in terrible trackpad controls like the cheap version being sold in BestBuy atm.
Rootable. (if you want to put the entire bootable OS part on a seperate SDcard inside that's not easily accesible? Go for it, but these devices WILL be hacked. Making it repairable as people learn helps make a better device for customer/client.)
Accept that some people will use them landscape, some portrait, take into account button/headphone positioning. Don't try and force landscape. (again, launchers help us get around this, so... save some time!)
More blue LEDs please
Re:Pwns the galaxy S... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure about "owning the iPad". There's a lot of things to dislike about Apple - i'm certainly no fanboi - but the user interface response of the iPad isn't one of them. I was looking at Android tablets just yesterday, tried out a Galaxy Tab in the flesh and it seemed clunky and slow compared to my iPad. This is before I'd read any reviews that basically also slammed the performance. 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.
I'm working on apps for both iOS and Android at the moment (don't bother looking on my website - hasn't been updated for about 10 years ;-) ) and the difference in performance on both the devices and the emulators is striking. Obviously it doesn't help that the Android tablets are currently running operating systems designed for phones. I'll be interested to see how Honeycomb performs on live kit. I really hope it does fix the performance problems.
I might as well rant about the Android emulator while I'm on it - it's virtually unusable on any hardware I have - a well specced iMac, and even my gaming rig with 12GB RAM and an i7 950 can only run it at about 70% of the speed of an old Google G1! (528mhz phone with 192MB RAM) I mean come on! The iPhone simulator is doing the same job, and easily outpaces the hardware phone. I was using emulators 10 years ago on a PC with far lower specs that ran flawlessly. The excuses for the lamentable performance that I've read are centered around the Android emulator being an accurate emulation of all aspects of the platform. This is all well and good, but if it means it's too slow to accurately emulate the speed of even the slowest hardware, then it's pointless. I hope to god that someone at Google is sorting this out, because bad toolsets are one of the biggest turnoffs to developers.
Re:Pwns the galaxy S... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure about "owning the iPad". There's a lot of things to dislike about Apple - i'm certainly no fanboi - but the user interface response of the iPad isn't one of them. I was looking at Android tablets just yesterday, tried out a Galaxy Tab in the flesh and it seemed clunky and slow compared to my iPad. This is before I'd read any reviews that basically also slammed the performance. 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.
From what I've heard this is due to differences in the way the two operating systems work. iOS takes an approach that the UI should always be responsive and fluid at the expense of other things. Load a /. article and have it display hundreds of comments and start scrolling like mad towards the top. It'll scroll smoothly, but eventually you'll hit a point where it hasn't rendered that part of the page so you don't actually see anything there until it renders it (usually a second or so). Android on the other hand will load the entire page and render it, but trying to scroll through all of it will cause things to appear choppy. Things get even worse if there are a lot of Flash elements on the page. The device prioritizes those over UI touch events so it starts to feel clunky at times. Comes down to different design philosophies.
Re:Doing it wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pwns the galaxy S... (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't Android use QEMU for its emulator? Is ARM QEMU running Debian/etc similarly slow on your machines?
Re:Pwns the galaxy S... (Score:2, Interesting)
Or they were busy implementing other things, like browser plugin support (Flash), live wallpaper, widgets, object sharing, wifi tethering, voice recognition, requiring to effectively make two copies of the api (Native and Dalvik), a push notification system that doesn't just send tiny numbers and symbols, etc. Android's functionality is a lot greater, and that's the target audience Google was aiming for first -- those who want functionality and freedom, not the common everyday person -- they knew they had no chance to go toe-to-toe with the fruit for the common everyday person.
Until, of course, Honeycomb / Ice Cream Sandwich.
Now their interface support is now so much richer than that of the fruit. There's more than just sliding panes as you might have seen with the Honeycomb preview. (if not, go to youtube.com/Android)
It's pretty pathetic that Google - who's probably putting as much resources into Android as it is making off of the "Google Experience" licensing - is largely keeping up or surpassing the fruit considering the fruit has only about 4 major products on the market *AND* is making money hand over fist due to their closed infrastructure. Sure the UI isn't as smooth right now, but it's significantly more capable and useful (not to say it can't play games either).