Dell has started selling its Streak 7 tablet in the UK, with the 7-inch slate streaking ahead of similarly sized rivals such as the HTC Flyer and BlackBerry PlayBook. The Streak 7 runs Android 2.2 Froyo, and is being sold by Dell for £299.
That’s for the Wi-Fi-only model, mind: Dell says the Wi-Fi and 3G version will be available later this spring. The new device builds on the original 5-inch Dell Streak, which was released last year.
Android 2.2 may sound a little old-hat, although Dell says the Streak 7 will allow over-the-air upgrades, so we suspect Gingerbread will be incoming sooner rather than later.
Honeycomb 3.0? It remains open to question whether 7-inch tablets will be getting Google’s tablet-focused flavour of Android, since the HTC Flyer is also sticking with Gingerbread for now.
The Streak 7 includes a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls and a 5-megapixel rear cam with auto focus and flash. Inside lurks a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 16GB of internal storage and a memory card slot for up to 32GB more. The 7-inch display is WVGA 800×480-pixel resolution, and uses Gorilla Glass to toughen it up.
Dell is also making a fuss about its Stage user interface, which is preloaded on the device and bundles together a selection of widgets to access music, videos and social networks. Dell is promising new features later in the year though, including wireless syncing of your photos, contacts, calendars and other content across various Dell-made devices, including PCs.
We’re increasingly attracted by the 7-inch tablet form factor, albeit more as a mobile device to carry around with us than as a home slate — the forte of larger tablets such as Apple’s iPad 2. We were impressed by the Streak 7 when we got hands-on with it recently, so stand by for a review as soon as we get the finished article in our hands.