Last month, I reported on the beginnings of a trend in the US for business travellers to use the Apple iPad as an on-the-road laptop substitute. At that stage, we in Europe had no hands-on experience of the iPad, but now I've tried it in work mode in planes, trains and automobiles, as well as carrying it around city centres on meeting-filled days, I can say it absolutely does the job.
If you buy the (rather clumsy) iPad keyboard dock for typing, or Apple's remote Bluetooth keyboard), it is even more laptop-like. I've found, however, that for typing a few emails or notes, I'm fine with the on-screen keyboard — so long as you use the, to my mind, essential official iPad case, which folds over cleverly to angle the iPad suitably.
Yet while the iPad is a useful business tool, as well as a fantastic gadget to use in the home, even its biggest fans could not suggest it is a truly portable machine. It's just too big and too fragile to use on the street.
All of which has given Dell the chance to nip in sneakily with a quite brilliant new product called the Streak. It's a kind of iPad Nano with considerable — gigantic, actually — benefits over the iPad.
The Dell Streak, with its five-inch screen, is a quarter the size of an iPad, but almost twice as big as an iPhone, so watching films or reading documents or e-books on the Streak is still reasonably comfortable - you're not squinting at it as you do watching a video on a smart phone. The Streak weighs less than a third of the iPad's already pretty svelte form.
The Streak fits a suit or jeans pocket without a struggle, which isn't something you can say about an iPad, unless you happen to work as a clown. But, of equal importance, the Streak works as a phone, which even the scorchingly expensive iPad models with a SIM card don't.
There's more. The Streak can be connected to a PC via an outboard USB port — which makes getting documents, photos, videos and the rest on to it less of a faff than on the iPad. The Streak has expandable memory, taking Micro SD cards up to 32Gb, albeit these don't quite yet exist.
And more: the Dell interloper has a removable battery, so you can carry a charged spare and not get caught short as iPhone users are resigned to being. (To be fair, the iPad has a massive ten-hour or more battery life and the next iPhone, just out, is considerably improved in this area, too.)
For web, the Streak uses the faster-than-3G HSDPA system, with speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps. It also runs the excellent Google Android interface, which allows you to have several applications open together. The Streak has a Dell twiddle as well, which means you can leave your Facebook and Twitter accounts to update automatically. Nice, I suppose.
The Streak has a decent 5 megapixel camera, plus another front facing camera for video calling. The camera has a flash — speaking of which, so does the web browser. As long as Apple and Adobe continue their corporate handbag fight, of course, the iPad irritatingly does not.
Phew. And if all this isn't enough, the new Dell baby is... droppable. More or less. It is fronted with a Corning product called Gorilla Glass, which is more or less unbreakable.
OK, let's try not to get too excited. What advantages does the iPad retain over the Streak? Well, firstly, it's an unparalleled delight to use. The Apple screen's zoom and contract function is unbeatable. The iPad is also big enough to type on for real. The Apple eBookstore and the book reader are wonders - although the books are crazily expensive.
What the remarkable Dell Streak actually is, is not so much an iPad killer as a serious contender to rain on the parade of the next generation iPhone. At the time of writing, I haven't yet fully played with the new iPhone 4. But this device from boring-but-important Dell sets a heck of a marker. I would be seriously tempted to buy it instead of the new iPhone, even if venturing outside Apple's familiar walled garden would be uncomfortable.
For more information visit dell.co.uk. From around £429, or from £25 a month with an O2 contract
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