Friday, 17 December 2010

Android 2.2 on Dell Streak

as you'll know from previous posts, I own a Dell Streak mobile phone/tablet. If i'm honest I stopped using it for a while. The touch screen was ultra temperamental, any sort of moisture on the screen, either by body or atmosphere caused it to freak out, on a couple of occasions I was unable to hang up because of a couple of rain drops on the screen.. the only way to end the call was to take the battery out.

I had continued to use it as a satnav device in my car utilising the Rebel Sim adaptor to allow me to use an alternative networks sim card. this all worked really well.

Yesterday I got the black triangle popup to tell me that there was an Android update available.. woooo Android 2.2! So went ahead and tried to install the upgrade. I won't knock Google. I'm always impressed by their presentation and intuitive design (they're contacts system was dog poo not so long ago but it now very much sorted) however I will criticise Dells little input.

When you first try to install the update, it advises you to download another piece of software from Dell to backup all your settings etc. It then says to re-run the update program. Download, backup.. rerun update software, whereupon you're met by the same info.. download this software, back up your settings then re run the update program... I did this a few times getting more and more irritated.. by chance I clicked on the greyed out "back" icon which inexplicably took me to the page allowing me to download the actual Android update... totally random as you're not actually going "back" to anything..

Anyhoo, after a lot of swearing the update finally went through.. Android 2.2 looks great! it works really well and again makes the Dell even better than with 2.1 and that was fantastic compared to 1.6 which now by comparison looked like complete plop.

I'll try and put some screen shots up for you so you can see what its like.

One problem I've noticed and have seen mentioned on a couple of other sites involve the browser, it basically crashes every time you close it... which is better than it crashing when you don't want to close it I guess. I'm sure Google will release a little patch for that issue in time.

Fear not about upgrading to 2.2. It works really well and makes inputting text even easier than before. the off centre landscape keyboard has been sorted although its still not that comfortable typing with your thumbs. typing in portrait mode with one finger is still more comfortable.

Another major alteration is the portrait mode for the home screen. whereas with 2.1 it would always remain in landscape mode no matter how you held the phone, in 2.2 it actually rotates, which works really well.