Dell Strikes Streak 5
Turns out the disappearance of Dell’s Streak 5 tablet from retail store shelves wasn’t the harbinger of an update, but of the device’s demise.
With sales reportedly well below Dell’s expectations, the company has killed the diminutive tablephone, leaving this “Goodbye Streak 5” page as a memorial to its brief existence.
Too large to carry comfortably as a phone and too small to truly leverage the tablet form factor, the Streak — which was demoed onstage at D8 — struck a number of odd compromises in an effort to establish a market for a tweener device.
But ultimately it failed to do so, undermined by its design (our own Walt Mossberg likened using the Streak as a phone to holding a waffle to his head); the outdated version of Android it launched with; and an ill-conceived pricing scheme ($300 with a two-year carrier contract; $550 without — $50 more than a 16 gigabyte iPad).
Apple CEO Steve Jobs once said tweener devices were “too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.” In the case of the Streak 5, he was right.
Below, video of Dell’s Streak 5 demo at D8:
