The three buttons at the bottom (or right, when held in its normal landscape mode) are capacitive. The Android buttons used are Home, Menu, and Back.
It features a Dell skin on top and has a cradle adapter with HDMI out. The phone lacks the navigational trackball found in many previous Android devices. While FM radio support is not an official feature, an FM radio chip was found upon inspection of the Streak's internal hardware, and can be accessed though a user's modification of the OS.[5]
A seven-inch version of the Streak was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2011.[6] The Wall Street Journal reviewed it unfavorably in February.[7] A long-rumored ten-inch model[8][9] went on sale in August in China.[10]
Dell discontinued the Streak 5 on as of August 15, 2011. Customers attempting to purchase the device were directed to a "Good Bye, Streak 5" landing page. The larger Streak 7 was discontinued on December 2, 2011; Dell continued to sell a 10-inch tablet in China at that time.[11]
Pre-release
The development was first disclosed in June 2009[12] and in October 2009 it was known that the tablet was capable of making 3G phone calls.[13]
Customers on the British O2 mobile phone network were given the opportunity to install Android 2.1 in early September 2010 through an Over the Air update. This update, however, caused an uproar amongst consumers, over bugs and removal of some features from the previous software.[15]
Source code and rooting
Following protests from users that Dell, by not including source code, had violated the terms of the GNU General Public License,[16] the source code for the Dell Streak became available for download.[17][18]
There is a root method for the Dell Streak, and many roms are available, including iterations of the CyanogenMod ROM. These are available from the xda-developers website along with other ROMS.
Reception
The Streak 7 received a tepid reaction from one reviewer due to its poor display and software bugs/glitches at launch.[19] The Streak was considered bulky, and the Android 2.2 "Froyo" that it ran was geared more for smartphones instead of tablets.[20] While almost all tablet computers released in 2011 had failed to gain much market share in the face of overwhelming demand for the Apple iPad 2, the Streak 7 compared poorly to other Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
InfoWorld has suggested that Dell treated the Streak as a "Frankenphone business", where OEMs see tablets as a short-term, low-investment opportunity running Android OS, but this approach neglected the user interface and this failed to gain long term market traction with consumers.[21]
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Dell_Streak, and is written by contributors.
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