The Dell Streak Review

The Performance Problem

When I first played with the Streak seven months ago it felt quick. The Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 inside was the king of the hill. Today, it’s a different world. Apple’s A4 and TI’s OMAP 3630 are where it’s at.

Performance is a definite problem. Let’s say you’re on the rightmost home screen, number four by default, and tap the home key to return to the main home screen. It takes a full three seconds for the Streak to get to the main home screen and stop animating. Not to mention that the animations are choppy along the way.

There are wireless and battery indicators in the upper right corner of the screen. Tap on those indicators to bring up more detailed information about the battery and network options among other things. The only problem? The detailed info takes roughly 1.3 seconds to pop up. You expect it to be instantaneous but it’s far from it.

The camera app takes 3.2 seconds to launch. But even worse is that it takes 3.3 seconds from the moment you hit the shutter release until you get to review the picture you just took.

This may seem like picking nits but grab a Droid X or iPhone 4 and see if you can measure any popup or transition in any number of seconds. You can’t.

In a world of iPhone 4s and Droid Xs the Streak just doesn’t feel quick. Not only that, but it doesn’t even feel like it’s of this generation. A large part of the Streak’s performance is due its OS: Android 1.6. A look through any of our benchmarks will show you that despite using a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC, the Streak doesn’t perform anywhere close to the Nexus One, HTC Incredible or Droid X. Let’s forget about comparing it to the iPhone 4 or iPad.

Web page rendering isn’t as bad as interacting with the OS. Pages load slower than Android 2.1 devices but it’s not painfully slow. Most of the time you’re limited by the speed of the cellular network to begin with. Web browsing is painful however as scrolling is very choppy. While this is a problem with all Android devices I’ve used, it’s clearly worse on the Streak.

Rightware’s BrowserMark is representative of the sort of web page rendering performance I saw on the Streak.

In this test the Streak offers roughly 80% of the performance of Motorola’s Droid X. I’d say that’s representative of the web page rendering performance I saw on a regular basis.

SunSpider supports what we've seen thus far. Despite having a 1GHz Snapdragon, the Streak performs more like a faster Droid than a Droid X.

Linpack and Benchmark Pi show the limitations of Android 1.6 more clearly. In both cases the Streak is slower than the original Motorola Droid with its 500MHz Cortex A8 based TI OMAP 3430.

Qualcomm’s Neocore benchmark shows us that the Adreno 200’s GPU drivers are seemingly mature, at least for 3D rendering in Android 1.6. There’s barely any difference between the Streak and QSD8250 based Snapdragon devices in this test.

Thankfully Dell has promised to deliver Android 2.2, codenamed Froyo, on the Streak before the end of the year. The only problem with that promise is Dell is asking for your money today. If you purchase the Streak today yes, you’ll get a wonderful upgrade for free at some point in the future, but in the interim you’ll have horrible performance - at least for a $600 device.

Even if you’re considering the Streak, I’d recommend waiting until the 2.2 update. There’s no reason for you to provide Dell with an interest-free loan until then.