James Governor's Monkchips

The real issue with the Dell Streak – not its physical, but its energy footprint. iPad wins.

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As I have said before I like the Dell Streak 5’s form factor. A jacket pocket-sized tablet is fine by me. No – the real problem with the Streak wasn’t that it was “too big for a phone, too small for a tablet” but rather that it needed recharging all the time. True mobility requires a long battery life, which is perhaps where Zuckerburg was wrong about the iPad -of course its a mobile device-you can carry it around for a day without a charge.

The Streak on the other hand is never really happy unless its plugged in for recharging. I think Dell will make some great devices, and 5 inch may be a great form factor for mobile workers…. but Dell needs to hire some engineers to be remorseless about energy efficiency. The iPad is frankly astounding in terms of energy consumption; at rest it basically doesn’t draw power – we should put the team in charge of global power efficiency. The Android community, meanwhile, needs to learn the power lesson from Apple.

3 comments

  1. I don’t think the Android community has much to learn about power consumption. A device that is both a phone ad a tablet is likely to use more power than one that is just one or the other. In like with like situations I don’t see more than marginal differences and these are likely to disappear with refinements to software.

  2. I pretty much agree having used my Streak as my main phone. Often don’t get a full day out of it. GPS is a real power drain.

    However it may be some power hungry apps are at fault:

  3. Steve – too true. Also while android notifications and background syncing are cool for users, they are a power drain.

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