The mediocre capacitive multitouch screen is another sore spot. The resolution is 800 by 480 pixels, the same as we've seen on tablets such as the ViewSonic ViewPad 7 and the HP Zeen (which is sold only with the Photosmart C510 printer it's intended to be used with). The display is a huge disappointment, its weaknesses glaringly obvious when I placed the Streak 7 side by side with the Galaxy Tab (which has a 1024-by-600-pixel resolution). Images looked washed out and lacked punch; text was barely passable, and certainly not well suited for long stretches of reading given the noticeable pixelation and the sparkly background. Even game graphics looked blocky and pixelated at times, in spite of the Nvidia Tegra T20 dual-core 1GHz processor.
Glitches Galore
What really holds the Streak down, however, is its apparent bugginess. The screen on my test model became unresponsive on a number of occasions, for instance. And unlike most of its competition, the Streak 7 boasts a full-size SD Card slot--but in my case the unit locked up several times upon the insertion of four different SD Cards (eventually it just rebooted itself, only to freeze again on startup). One of those SD Cards, which had worked fine earlier, upon reboot and reinsertion became identified as a 'damaged card'--and when I next popped the card into my Windows 7 laptop, it crashed the PC too. Fortunately, the data on that 16GB card appears to be present (I haven't tried opening every last image or document), but the experience now makes me leery of using one of the coolest features of the Streak 7, which is supposed to facilitate moving files between a laptop and tablet, or viewing images freshly captured on a digital camera. At least, I wouldn't try it with a card that I haven't backed up first.
When I did get this feature to work, I got a glimpse of how much fun it could be to view the contents of my camera's SD Card on the Streak 7. After I popped the card in, the Streak 7 successfully (but slowly) mounted the card to recognize the media and add it to the Gallery for viewing. At this writing, Dell had no suggestions as to why these crashes might have happened, and reps suggested that I try a second unit. I will do so and update this review accordingly.
