Moving on...

It has been a long time since my last post here - over a year in fact. I guess I just have not felt like it. My last post was shortly after the death of my brother-in-law and was probably dark and depressing. My wife was not working and I had probably just ended or was about to end working at a position I had really liked but which had been decimated by layoffs.

Now it is Autumn, 2010 - a daughter in college and a son in high school plus a wife once again gainfully employed. I am at a great company who loves open source and takes excellent care of their employees, the Yankees have made the post season and I have tickets for Saturday's game. In the toys department I purchased an iphone4 the day it became available and an ipad on day one as well. Both totally rock and I cannot wait for the jailbreak for IOS4. I use both on a daily basis as I once again have my long-ass commute to Manhattan.

The new toy is a Dell Streak. Dell released it this past Friday and shipped one to me overnight on that same day so it reached me yesterday. Upon opening it the first thing I noticed was the size. All I could think of was: WTF?!? Too big for a phone and too small for a tablet. It occurs to me that had I neither iphone nor ipad, this one unit would be an interesting compromise. Let's face it - a good chunk of the calls we make these days are done with the help of ear buds with a mic or a bluetooth headset of some sort, so it being larger than a phone is not a big problem, although I tend to keep my phone in my rear pants pocket - not happening with this thing.

What about using it as a tablet? It is honestly going to take me a while to get used to android. Not that there is anything bad about it, just that I have been using my ipad for months now and I have gotten used to it. Everythign is different, including aiming for the buttons. With the ipad you have to aim low - with this thing you have to aim high, so I keep missing.

The big disappointment with the Streak in Android 1.6. Seriously Dell? 1.6 in late 2010? Fortunately there is an active hacking community that sent me to a program that lets me feed images to the streak and told me how to put the streak into the mode to accept those images. So I loaded the O2 (UK cell phone carrier) image of Eclaire (Android 2.1) onto the SD card in the root as Update.pkg, put the Dell restore image onto my mac, ran the loader program, put the Streak into loading mode (turn on while holding the camera button), loaded the image, turned it off, turned it on holding both the volume up and volume down keys which tells it to look for Update.pkg at the root of the SD card, loaded the update and *poof* - upgraded.

Dell tells me the Froyo (Android 2.2) will be pushed OTA to the devices before the end of the year, probably before Thanksgiving, so I will probably have to do this all again to load the Android 1.6 image back on so the Streak thinks it is once again an AT&T device, but for now 2.1 is far better than 1.6. I have loaded apps, played music and videos, surfed the web - all work nicely.

The videos work out very nicely on the 5" 800x480 screen. I think that if I need to go on a trip and do not feel like packing ton of tech, I'll just swap my SIM into the streak and take that with me.

The real drawback? The lack of cheap third party charging cables.