Dell Streak

» see dell.com/streak as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Dell shipped the Streak in Britain on 4 June 2010, through O2, at £399 without a contract. The screen was five inches across at 800 by 480 pixels behind Gorilla Glass, which in 2010 meant it did not fit any shelf anyone was selling from. Android 1.6 was already old on the day the device launched, and Dell did not get it to 2.2 until well into the following year.

American buyers got it in August through AT&T at $299.99 on a two-year contract, or $549.99 outright. The reviews were consistent about the shape rather than the hardware: too large to hold against a face, too small to read a page on. By January Dell had cut the contract price to $99.99, which is what a company does when it wants the inventory gone.

The end went up on Dell's own product page on Thursday 11 August 2011, fourteen months after the first one sold. The page read goodbye, Streak 5, it's been a great ride, which is a strange thing to find where a buy button used to be. The Streak 7 lasted until 2 December that year and the Streak 10 Pro only ever shipped in China.

~ the case file ~

~ the five inch problem ~

There was no word for a five-inch device in 2010. The press called it a tablet when it wanted to complain about the phone parts and a phone when it wanted to complain about the tablet parts. Dell's own marketing never settled it either, so the product spent its whole life being described by what it sat between.

~ three weeks ~

Samsung announced the Galaxy Note at IFA in Berlin at the start of September 2011, three weeks after Dell stopped selling the Streak. It had a 5.3-inch screen, larger than the thing Dell had just been told was too large, and it sold ten million units in its first year. Every phone sold today is a Streak that arrived on time.

The Streak was a carrier product in two countries and Turkey was not one of them. O2 and AT&T is the entire distribution story. If you were buying an Android phone in Ankara in 2010 you were looking at whatever Turkcell and Vodafone had put on the shelf, which meant HTC and Samsung. I read about the Streak that year and never once saw one in a shop.

~ what dell did next ~

Dell spent 2012 pulling out of consumer mobile entirely. The Venue phones went and the Android tablets went with them. In October 2013 the company took itself private and rebuilt around servers and storage sold to businesses. It returned to tablets under the Venue name running Windows, aimed at corporate buyers rather than at anyone who had wanted a Streak.

The device itself had a long second life on XDA, where the community kept porting newer Android builds onto hardware Dell had stopped acknowledging. Unofficial builds of Android 4 were running on it years after Dell stopped shipping updates.

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