I have had my new Dell Streak for a week now after returning my iPhone 3G and I have to say I am quite impressed and I certainly like it more than the iPhone. I have had comments that is wrong to compare against the iPhone 3G and I should have got the iPhone 4G, but sorry I think this is crap, I owned an iPhone3G so that is of course what I am going to review or compare against. I also read about all the new features and improvements to the iPhone4 and it was nothing earth shattering, yes it resolved a couple of big issues for some people but did not make me want to buy one and would not have resolved most of my dislikes or issues.

I will also mention that I got this upgrade completely FREE from O2. they initially told me this would cost over £200 thus why I did not upgrade to the Dell Streak right away, but after calling them to explain I wanted to return the iPhone and get the Streak, I was mysteriously told this was also a FREE upgrade. their email support team of course tried to deny this, but luckily all phone call on my VOIP line are recorded, so I won this argument and they then finally apologised and said they got it wrong and it was indeed a free upgrade. So if you are an O2 customer, do not deal with them via email as this is outsourced to India and in my experience so far they are utterly hopeless and will give you completely nonsense responses, blatantly lie to you and generally don;t seem to have a clue. Calling O2 directly seems to only go through to their UK office where you will end up speaking to someone in the UK who actually understands English.

Here's a short video I found on the Dell YouTube channel that provides a quick overview of what you can use Streak for:

The first thing I will say is that the Streak is indeed BIG, and you need to be the type of person that is happy carrying around a PDA or mobile media player such as an Archos and always has pockets to put things in. If you wear loose fitting jeans it will probably still fit in your pocket. If you like small phones, leave now. That said, it is actually quite thin and light and fits quite nicely in my shirt pockets, as long as I don't bend over and send it crashing to the floor.

What you get with this size though is a sweet 5" screen that is actually possible to comfortably watch videos or even movies on. The menus and navigation are also a joy to use thanks to the Android OS, by default to have 3 desktops that you can move between with a swipe of the finger (just like the iPhone), however you also have the ability to add more desktops and to choose what shortcuts or gadgets go on each. So you can have one for games, one for apps and one for web pages for instance. The first desktop has a facebook and twitter gadget as standard so you can be online and receiving updates all day long. Not really my thing as I don't feel the urge to tell the world every time I go to the toilet, eat a sandwich or walk across the street, but clearly I am in the minority here.

Where Android does slightly fall down for me is the text size, I have terrible eyesight (+12) and some of the font sizes I do struggle to read and have not as yet found any setting to increase the font sizes. This is the one thing I did like about the iPhone, everything was big and chunky and easy to use.

The onscreen keyboard is also pretty good too, I can't quite type with my thumbs without making mistakes, something that could be fixed by getting rid of the keypad and making number accessible via an alternate keymap, but I am happy finger typing. Anyone with smaller fingers than me would have no issues.

The email client built into Android is pretty pants and the iPhone mail beats it hands down. The interface is poor, it is not very user friendly and not a pleasure to use at all. It also comes with built in Gmail, which Google have clearly spent more time on than the regular email client. All is not lost though as there are alternatives, such as k-9 mail which is free and does a better job and also has configurable font sizes, yay. It took me all of 5 minutes to find this on the Android marketplace, download it and install it.

What I loved most of all about Android is the ability to browse and install software directly onto the Streak without having to go near my PC. This was not something I had expected and thought only the iPhone could do this, so it was a big bonus, I have installed a few programs without any issues at all, and it is fast.

Copying files to Android and the Streak is also a snap. Plug it into your USB and it asks you how you want to connect, either to transfer media, to transfer other files or charge only. If you choose media then you will get an external disk with all the media files and folders, otherwise you get everything else. When I had my iPhone what I thought would be a simple task of copying the mp3 ringtone from my old phone turned out to be a nightmare. iTunes wont allow you to copy random filesm only sync and iPhone wont play mp3 files anyway.

On my Streak it is easy peasy, I copied the file across, played it in the media player then chose "make it my ringtone" from the options menu, couldn't be easier, sorry Apple you #fail.

WIFI access is also stupidly simple, detect, login, go, that's it. when I am home or work it automatically logs into my local network and uses it for browsing or downloading email.

I was concerned about the lack of a Satnav, which was also a major issue with the iPhone, but at least there are viable solutions for the Android, for the iPhone I was better off buying a TomTom.

I installed the Google GPS Navigation Beta software and so far it seems to work well. The spoken directions are clear and concise and actually more detailed than others I have used. Instea dof just "turn left after 500yrds" I got "after 500 yards turn left on to some road name and continue down the A22". The 3D map doesn't compare to TomTom, but I guess this will improve over time.

The camera on the Streak is also surprisingly good, the photos and video I have taken so far have been perfectly good quality and great for snapping of pictures of the kids when we are out, it also has a flash and both front and rear facing cameras, the rear facing is a low-res webcam for video calling.

This was also another major downer for the iPhone, the built in camera was not even worth having it was so poor.

The battery life of the Streak is probably just as bad as the iPhone, given average use you will need to charge it every single night and I would imagine actually watching an entire movie would probably drain it. However at least you can actually remove the battery and swap in a backup, unlike the iPhone which does not allow you to access the battery.

Overall, I like it and my niggles are fairly minor, I am glad I chose this phone and I love Android, I think my wife now wants one too :-)

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