Performance and Battery

The Streak kind of surprised me after I got Froyo running on it. The 1GHz Snapdragon processor (source: streaksmart) feels pretty responsive. With 512MB of RAM, there’s a lot of room for applications. The UI (with LauncherPro) is snappy.

Running the benchmarking app Quadrant, with DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid 1.8.1, I was able to get a score of 1267 which I hear is pretty good. I certainly have no complaints about the speed of applications running on the Streak.

The battery feels a little weak under use. Having a 30 minute Skype conversation while connected to 3G almost killed my charge (after running a day on standby). I tend to nurse the battery by keeping the Streak in airplane mode most of the time and only turning on wifi or 3G when I need to connect to something. If I were using this as a phone, that’d be a royal pain. The battery’s replaceable in this, so you could have a backup, but with the annoyance of pulling the back plate off, that’d feel like a pretty big failure.

The charging cable’s a proprietary 30pin edge connector similar to an iPhone dock plug. I assume they did this for connection to the AV Dock accessory, but it’s a real pain in the ass as the Streak only comes with one (short) cable in the box. With a battery like this, I’d want to stow chargers in my vehicles and carry one in my laptop bag. If you’re planning on taking this on a long trip and expect to be able to read a book, listen to music, watch a video and do some communications with it, you’d better bring some extra batteries, a cable and a power-source.

The Form

For starters, it’s the first touch-screen device I’ve used that’s comfortable to thumb type on in portrait mode. The iPad is too wide for this, and I usually turn it to landscape for finger typing. The iPhone is too small to comfortably type on in portrait mode, though I keep trying to do it and botching it. I find the iPhone uncomfortable in landscape. The 5″ screen of the Dell Streak actually works really well, especially after disabling Swype.

The soft buttons on the Streak are stuck in landscape mode, suggesting the device is meant to be used in that orientation most of the time. This is weird. For reading web pages and viewing text, portrait is so much more comfortable. The lockscreen even defaults to landscape and won’t reorient into portrait if you’re holding it that way so you end up reading the clock sideways all the time. That’s annoying and feels kind of silly. Also, the Streak is possibly the only Android device without a search button. I have to say, I think the search button is unnecessary so I don’t mind its omission.

The case is predominantly hard black plastic with a removable metal plate on the back housing the SIM, microSD slot and battery. Removal is awkward but reseating the little metal tabs back into their slots is even trickier. There is no indication that the plate is fully-seated. It just sort of slides into place with no click to let you know it’s all the way in. I think I’ve already bent at least one of the tabs that hold it in during the many times I had to pull the battery during my firmware upgrade trials.

Still, fully assembled, the Streak actually looks pretty good. I got no shortage of oohs and ahhs when I pulled it out at my local bar and passed it around. People asked if it was a phone. If it was for reading books. If it was a little computer. I even ended up in a conversation about Android with a non-techie friend who showed me her phone when she recognized I was running the same OS and Launcher as her. Even some of the tech-jaded people in California on a recent visit would take a look and ask about it and give it a whirl.

It’s weird, but I actually think the Streak was a bigger hit than my iPhone 4 which, from a hardware angle, is decidedly sexier, in my opinion. The build quality is certainly an order of magnitude higher and I can buy a decent case for the iPhone.

The Radios

The Streak has a capable GSM/HSDPA Qualcomm radio in it. It’ll operate in quad-band GSM or in one of two 3G HSDPA modes (source: gsmarena) depending on your carrier and firmware. Speedtest.net’s application gave between 1000 and 2500kbps download and 50-250kbps up on Rogers. Having used some terminal clients remotely, I can say that the connection is perfectly acceptable. With Froyo, the Streak works as a wifi hotspot as well so you can use it to power a portable personal network.

The Wifi radios are not exactly state-of-the-art though. The best the Streak can manage is 802.11g and it seems to have a hard time staying connected for more than about an hour on a WPA connection. I had to open an 802.11g network in my house to support it since everything I use now has 802.11n. Range appears to be adequate though.

A funny thing happened the first time I turned on Bluetooth on the streak to pair a headset. It was sitting on my desk and I powered on the radio. I have a bunch of bluetooth and wifi devices on my work desk, keyboards, mice, trackpads and my main computer, a Mac Pro uses bluetooth for its keyboard and trackpad. When I turned on bluetooth on the streak, the bluetooth radio in my Mac stopped working and flashed an error in the little bluetooth indicator in the menu bar. I had to reboot the computer to get bluetooth working again. That’s some radio! Presumably it works fine if you keep it away from your computers.

The Screen

It has been maligned across the web as being too hard to view from an angle. Honestly, I don’t find the 5″ TFT gorilla glass LCD that bad. How often do you look at these things off-axis? My one beef is that the screen’s resolution should be higher. Not sure if it’s a limitation of the original operating system it shipped with or if it was to keep the price down but it should really have more pixels. Touch controls feel precise and colors are reasonably vibrant even if the temperature is a tad cool.

The Sound

The sound hardware in the Streak was pretty disappointing the first time I plugged in the provided in-ear headphones that came with it. Powering up Winamp or Songbird, when you first hit play on a song with any quiet passage, you can hear the audio hardware come online with a noticeable hiss. Signal-to-noise must be extremely low as the white-noise of the audio circuitry is easy to hear in the background of all but the loudest music. It’s less annoying when using it for Skype or watching Youtube video, but that’s hardly demanding. I will say that the built-in speaker can crank out some volume which is nice if you’re showing off a youtube video in a room. Not much else I can say about that, other than if you like quality sound, this is probably not going to make you happy.

The Cameras

The Dell Streak has both a front-facing and a rear camera. The rear camera is a 5 megapixel shooter with two LED flashes mounted next to it. It’s a pretty decent sensor and lens combination and I do like the pictures that come out of it… when I can get the camera to fire on time. The dual-position shutter button is very slow, sometimes taking a second or two to fire the shutter after focusing. The button itself requires a pretty firm press to push in shutter release mode which often means anything you’re shooting in low-light will come out looking blurry. I’m not a fan of LED flashes, but the ones on the Streak are powerful enough to light a subject up to a good 20ft away, based on some test shots. I’d put the camera roughly on par with the iPhone’s in terms of quality of image, but due to the lack of responsiveness, it’s going to lose points.

The front-facing camera is your typical 640×480 VGA chat cam. Not HD. Noisy.

Conclusions

After the painful process of ordering and receiving the Streak, I was all set to dislike this thing. The reviews I read during the long wait didn’t make me terribly excited to actually get my hands on it. Despite some of the limitations though, I do really like this thing. I’d feel a little silly using it as a phone (sidetalkin’!) without a headset, but as a datapad, it works really well. This is my first Android device and though lots of it feels a bit fiddly at times and upgrading different devices is a total crap-shoot, they’ve done some nice things with the operating system. It’s customizable to a fault. Picking up someone else’s Android device, there’s a big chance it’ll take you awhile to figure out what’s going on. Desktop widgets are a great feature that I wish iOS had. The back button is a very sticky interface element that I find myself trying to hit on my iPhone. I notice that I have to look for the back button on an iPhone now because they’re not really in a consistent place. Some of the apps available on Android are very nice and will give their iOS counterparts a strong run.

I think when we get some real video players on these things we’ll finally have a worthy alternative to iOS. This is a very good thing.

[update, official Rogers update available via this thread: http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Android/message-id/927]

Now that Rogers has finally released a Froyo update for the Streak, I think my own upgrade exploits are a little less necessary for the average human. Or maybe not. I haven’t read any reviews of the Rogers version yet, but I have a hard time believing it works as well as DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid firmwares. I’m using 1.8.0 now (aka Chernobyl Meltdown) and it seems to work very very well. He’s done a great job of packaging up a ROM with useful features and software and I recommend it heartily.

My own upgrade path took me all over the internet. With some helpful pointers from @gav_taylor on twitter, I found the XDA forums and from there, links to a trove of firmware options tailored (pun!) to my very needs. I started with an O2 version of the ROM which made my radios think they were operating somewhere in England and unable to work in high-speed mode on Rogers. But at least I could see the device’s potential. From there, I upgraded to a stock Dell 2.2 ROM (v318) and finally migrated to StreakDroid 1.6 (still Froyo, despite the confusing numbering). It was tricky, required a lot of removing the battery, and felt like I was going to brick my device at any second. Since then, DJ_Steve’s had two more releases, 1.7.0 and 1.8.0. I just installed the latter yesterday and it doesn’t seem very different from 1.7.0. I think it’s mostly a bug-fix release. Battery life seems improved, I think. [and so does jdmcivic, it appears]

So now that I’ve got this Froyo thing what do I think?

It makes a helluva difference for starters. It takes this smallish slab of metal and glass and plastic and turns it from being a cumbersome, graphically antiquated toy to something you can actually use and even enjoy. Froyo looks good and works well on this device. DJ_Steve’s tweaks make the Streak feel like a pretty capable device and adds some extra glitz to the environment. App switching is instantanous. LauncherPro (thanks for the rec, madhava!) with all the eye candy turned up to full is silky smooth. It runs very well, but is a little battery intensive (more on that in my review of the hardware). The Gingerbread keyboard is a huge improvement, especially with swype disabled.

There’s already a huge array of software available for Android. I was amazed to see the number of entries in the store is comparable to the iTunes app store, if not ahead of it now. Of course, there are some caveats. Not all of the software I’ve tested is as high quality as most of the featured items on the iTunes app store. The bar to entry feels a bit lower. That said, there are whole classes of application available for Android you just can’t get on iTunes. File managers, wifi hotspots (unnecessary with Froyo which has that capability built-in), rooting tools for the hacker-minded.

Appz

Like the iTunes App Store, one of the weakest aspects of the Android Marketplace is the application itself. There is a cool alternative for Android users though. I recommend AppBrain for managing your applications. It has some extra features like notifying you when your apps have updates and the ability to sync your installed apps. Highly recommended.

For music players, WinAmp seems like a pretty capable player. I haven’t played with the desktop version yet on Windows which will allow syncing and file management, but it looks like a pretty solid player. It comes with some widgets for controlling the app from your desktop launcher too. There’s also Songbird which I was surprised to find in here. There are various built-in music player apps as well.

Some apps have jumped  the AppStore boundary and are available in both Android and iTunes. Kindle for one I’ll be watching closely over the coming months as Apple’s tyrannical bid for Moar Monayz unfolds. I will say that the Android version feels like it’s a bit behind the iPhone version. Some features are missing (syncing books not purchased from the Kindle store) and some of the polish on the iTunes version. The music identifier Shazam is also here as well as the omnipresent Angry Birds. I haven’t tested either of these, but it’s nice to see that some of my favorites are on both platforms. It’ll make the eventual total migration less painful.

One completely absent category is the media player. Whither video players galore? I was totally shocked to see that the base media player that ships with Froyo is a really basic, incapable device mostly included to play recorded videos from the camera app. Apparently Android is turning on accelerated video in some future release of Android. I have no idea what codecs that will include (hopefully WebM?) or what that’ll mean for video apps like VLC who I hear is working on a port. This is kind of a deal-breaker for me as one of the best parts of my iPad is its ability to play glorious, high-quality video (admittedly after some transcoding in Handbrake). I have no doubt it will come, but it’s absence feels strange and unexpected. It is a let down.

Also exciting to see several web browsers on offer. The two I’ve been playing with most are the Firefox beta and Miren. I hear good things about Dolphin too. All of these are easily better than the default browser that Android ships with and it begs the question: Do Android devs talk to Chrome devs? Then again, I’m happy to have Firefox there so I don’t really care.

Still have a post on upgrading to alternate firmware forthcoming, though it’s less urgent all of a sudden.

First, some unboxing pictures.

Out of the Box

Powering up the Steak[sic] for the first time was exciting. After waiting a few minutes, I looked through the installed apps and menus. Something didn’t seem quite right though. This was not the OS I was expecting, having played with a few different Androids before. This one felt, well, old and slow. It outright failed to install Firefox on it, and judging by some of the reports on SUMO (Mozilla’s support forums), I was not alone in this. Something was clearly amiss.

Looking in the About screen, I quickly discovered what was wrong. It shipped with Android 1.6 (Donut). An operating system that first became available back in September of 2009 (according to the wikipedia entry on Android Version History). I could have sworn the site was claiming it came with 2.2 aka Froyo, the OS that’s been available in the UK for a couple of months at least. No luck.

(Note, that I just read on Streaksmart that the Streak is now available through Amazon in the US. Definitely recommend using them instead of Dell whose product page I won’t even link to after my own experience with them.).

I proceeded down the glorious and noble path of voiding my warranty to get the latest version of Android available for the Streak up and running.

Next up, the excitement of updating firmware, or, how to turn your steak into a brick!

They wouldn’t let me.

The agent informed me that the device was enroute to their shipping depot. I boggled at him. Did he know how long it would take? No. Could I get a tracking number? No. Was there anything else he could do for me today? I guess not!

So I waited. I pretty much gave up on ever seeing it. And naturally, that’s when it showed up.

First blog post written on it using the android wordpress app. I’ll follow up with my impressions of the Dell Streak (or Steak as I’ve come to call it) soon.

A quick search found this superuser suggestion to install the Synaptics touchpad driver from the Ubuntu repository. Searching in the package manager turned up libsynaptics and gsynaptics so I installed them both.

Before this would work, I needed to create a file according to the instructions found Kogan Agora Netbook blog:

sudo vim /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

Once opened, it needed to have the following as its contents:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

I have no idea of that version number is correct, but this allowed me to move on. Additionally, in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I added the section (via sudo vim):

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"
EndSection

after rebooting (or logging out, or restarting X), you can then run gsynaptics from gmrun or the terminal. Even better, assign a new entry to the OpenBox menu to execute gsynaptics from a System menu item labeled Touchpad. Once you have that, you can decrease the sensitivity of the touchpad, add and tweak acceleration values and modify tapping behavior. It works really well and has radically reduced the number of accidental mouse actions. This tweak alone has made the Crunchbang netbook experience much much better.

Dell Mini 10 with Ubuntu – touchpad issues – Super User.

Out of the box, Cunchbang is a fairly minimalist desktop environment, using Openbox and Tint as the desktop and window manager.  A bit of tweaking to get menu sizes reduced and it takes up even less space on your desktop. Since vertical space is at a serious premium on this thing, the biggest challenges were getting Firefox and Thunderbird configured to make the most of the tiny screen.

On Firefox, I’m using Full Screen (not necessary in Firefox 3.6, of course), Tree Style Tabs and a combined menu and toolbar to clear up some pixels. Reduced font-sizes from the default make browsing more manageable even when I’m not in full screen mode.

Thunderbird 3.0 was a bit trickier. In the advanced preferences pane, under the config editor, set mail.tabs.autoHide to True to get rid of the tabstrip if there’s only one tab showing. I also found the header area in the message pane was taking up a lot of room, so I installed the Compact Headers extension to take care of those. You will need to disable compatibility checking through Nightly Tester Tools or the config editor to get it to work with Tbird 3. (Thanks to wswmk in irc for the tips!)

Whether I could live with this as my main portable is another matter. The trackpad on the thing is pretty poor, requiring a really light touch to tap-to-click. There are no real buttons on it, but the two bottom corners act as left and right mouse clicks if you press the trackpad down — it clicks. Because the pad itself is so sensitive, this invariably moves the pointer off of your target and you’ll get a misclick. Even more amusing is the right-side scroll wheel. If you’re on the desktop in Crunchbang, this is interpreted as a “jump to workspace” action, randomly skipping you through your desktops. It took me awhile to realize I was doing this accidentally and that it was a feature.

Other interactions between OS and hardware are pretty good. With the exception of networking. Connecting to a wireless network is a bit of a crapshoot. I can connect at home on a wirless G network with WPA2 passphrase, but it takes too long to negotiate initially. I could not connect to my parents’ network after multiple attempts and they have a basic WEP passkey. I installed wicd as my default network manager after failing with Network Manager and it seems a little better, but still slow.

In short, networking in Linux still kind of sucks.

But sound works! And the included A/V apps in Crunchbang are decent if not awesome. VLC works really well and after struggling with SMB to get network shares working, I can even stream stuff off of my fileserver. Also includes Rhythmbox and Audacity among other open source audio-video apps. No Songbird though?

Overall, it’s a fun little machine to hack around on. Screen’s probably too small to do any development, but works just fine as a little internet toy or writing machine. That it’s entirely an opensource software stack helps too. I wrote this post on it, and genuinely like the keyboard (after flipping the Caps Lock and CTRL keys). It sure is portable.