Dell Streak: A tablet with a phone

As Apple’s controversial iPad has shown the world, there is a market for multitouch tablet PC’s.

Over 3 million iPads were sold worldwide, even if its price is not what you could easily call “user friendly” – $499 for the cheapest model.

The software market for the iPad also starts to blossom: according to Apple, there are over 20,000 apps written especially for the iPad and over 200,000 iPhone apps that also work on it.

As a result, Apple’s competitors on the market have started to release their own multitouch tablet PC’s in an effort to grab a slice of the emerging market. All these tablets are multi-purpose devices (unlike Amazon’s Kindle that is “only” an e-book reader) – they can be used for surfing the web, watching movies – streaming or otherwise, gaming, music or social networking.

Dell has joined the tablet war this week by releasing their take on the portable multitouch device – the Streak – but with a twist, as it is combining the capabilities of a smartphone and those of a tablet PC.

The Streak will be powered by Google’s Android operating system – version 1.6 at the release time, being capable of running the 70,000+ Android apps available – these apps will not look good on the device’s 5″ screen though, being written especially for smartphones, but apps written for Streak will surely follow. Updates to Android 2.2 are expected to be released later this year.

The Streak is bigger than an average smartphone, it’s 6 inches by 3.11 inches. It’s 5 inch screen has smaller resolution that the iPhone 4′s – WVGA (800×480) – thus being unfit for displaying HD videos. The processor powering the Streak is a 1GHz Snapdragon, it has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, a front-facing VGA camera, user-replaceable battery (another huge advantage over the iPhone), integrated 3G, WiFi (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity, 3 Gb of internal storage capacity and a MicroSD slot that can handle a 32Gb card.

So, Dell Streak is a tablet that can be used as a phone, or a phone that can be used as a tablet… only time will tell. The Streak will be available starting August 13th.