We hit up T-Mobile’s keynote, and while the biggest news was the Honeycomb-based G-Slate by LG, Big Magenta also showed off the new Dell Streak 7. It’s a larger version of the previous 5” Streak that we reviewed last year, this time with a 7” screen (hence the name) and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 instead of Snapdragon. The industrial design is pretty similar to the smaller Streak, just stretched to fit the newly enlarged screen. It’s larger and thicker overall than both the Galaxy Tab and the PlayBook, and at 450 grams, it’s heavier as well.
The build quality is good, and the weight gives the system a very substantial feel. I’ve been a fan of Dell’s recent handheld products - the Venue and Streak families are well-designed, well-built products that are honestly pretty decent to use (now that the Streak has been updated to Froyo). As with the other Streak, this one has Dell’s proprietary Stage UI on it, and it’s a good bit quicker than the 5” Streak. Even with Froyo, we found that one to be a bit on the sluggish side, but given the extra power on tap here, that wasn’t a problem.
The rest of the specs are good, with an HSPA+ radio (supporting T-Mobile’s “4G” network), a 1.3MP front facing camera, a 5MP rear camera, 16GB of internal storage, 2.4GHz 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, and Corning’s Gorilla Glass on the screen. But there’s a big problem - the screen resolution. This is a 7” tablet with an 800 x 480 (WVGA) screen resolution in a world running at 1024 x 600. I’m guessing Dell stuck to WVGA because Stage UI didn’t scale well to WSVGA screens, but really, WVGA is considered the standard for 3.5-5” screens. On a 7” display, WVGA computes to 133 pixels per inch, which just doesn’t cut it.
Other than that though, this appears to be a well built and highly specced tablet that is one of the better Froyo tablets we’ve seen. Unfortunately, with Honeycomb on the horizon, Froyo isn’t going to cut it for much longer. Hopefully, Dell has something up its sleeve for the future.
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