Dell flashes Streak 10, launches Streak 7
By-the-numbers tablet lifted from herd by 4G connectivity
CES 2011 Dell has extended its Streak family of Android tablets by two inches with the announcement of a 7in model and by five inches with the admission that a 10in version is "coming soon".
Dell briefly flashed the 10.1in Streak at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but put the Streak 7 centre stage, touting the tablet's Corning Gorilla Glass-covered face, its Nvidia Tegra dual-core 1GHz processor, 1.3Mp webcam, 5Mp stills cam, GPS, 32GB of Flash storage, and its 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
But there's more: the 7 will contain a 4G modem and - in the US at least - be sold ready to connect to T-Mobile's LTE network. Over in the UK, LTE is but a glint in network operators' eyes, so it's almost certain the Streak 7 will come with HDSPA 3G support there.
Streak 7, like Streak 5, will run Android 2.2, so Dell's clearly unwilling to wait for Android 3 Honeycomb. The 7's display resolution is just 800 x 480.
Dell didn't provide any Streak 10 specs, though it'll clearly be a scaled up 7 running Android. ®
COMMENTS
2.2?
>Streak 7, like Streak 5, will run Android 2.2, so Dell's clearly unwilling to wait for Android 3 Honeycomb
Fair enough on 3.0, but 2.3 has been on Nexuses over a month now........
Continuos Android updates...
are a gigantic pain in the rear-end.
Quite honestly 2.1 was only marginally different to 1.6
2.2, has nothing new that I can see of benefit to me.
Why should I want or even require an upgrade that again has nothing to offer me?
It's all very well creating new little bits and pieces here, but the cold hard fact is that the majority of users just won't bother to update their versions of Android and the phone companies know it.
I'm sure for us techies there are features to get (unecessarily) excited about, but really is there anything good about a company making new updates every 6 months?
If Google had any sense they'd limit updates to Android to once every 18months (which is the average contract length). That way, when someone upgrades their contract phone the latest model will have some slightly different software features in addition to hardware...making the upgrade worth it.
Personally, I'm disappointed with myself for falling into the Android trap. I'm able to do everything I need to with my SE C905 (phone, text, e-mail, even messaging), and the camera (stills) is far better than any of the latest "smart phones" due to it's optical zoom. The only benefit that android has really offered is a nice large screen to view e-mail, internet and videos on.
Truth be told when it gets to my upgrade date I won't care what version of android is on the phone, I'd rather get something that is an actual upgrade and will do something far (and I do mean FAR) better than either my C905 does it (camera) or my Android Smart Phone does it.
The 7's display resolution is just 800 x 480
So, I think, as far as Google are concerned its a phone and not a talbet thus it will get the marketplace etc. Things with higher resolutions are deemed to be "tablets" and thus Google don't consider Android 2.x as being worthy of them hence no marketplace for you.
800x480? so no improvement over my Streak 5 then
seems a bit low res for something that large. Surely they could have pushed to at least 1024 across.
