peterbirks | More Dell Streak joy

Some entertaining adventures in the life that is learning to live with the Dell Streak.

I left my charger in Bletchley and, although it has been posted to me, there's a good chance that it won't arrive until Christmas.

Finding a charger for the Dell Streak appears to be on a par with the Holy Grail. When I went into the O2 shop on London Wall and asked for one, the guy said that he would have to check. Meanwhile another guy said "sure, we have one", and sold me an Apple I Phone connection.

Now, I was fairly sure that this wouldn't fit, but I bought it anyway (my master plan will eventually be revealed). I then opened it, took it to another part of the shop, and confirmed to myself that it wouldn't fit. I took it back to the guy who had sold it to me and said, all innocent-like, "sorry, I'm useless with stuff like this. Could you show me how it connects?"

Needless to say, it didn't connect.

That kind of put them in a bit of a bind, because they had actually sold me something that they said would work, but didn't. Their easiest way round this was to break open a new Dell Streak box and cannibalize a charger lead. Well they might not have done that. Perhaps they did have a charger lead just lying around. But I somehow doubt it. So, my purchase of something that I knew would not work achieved its aim; I got something that would work. Even better, they let me keep the I-Phone charger lead!

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On the DLR train home I couldn't connect to the Internet. There was a phone signal, but no sign of 3G or any of the other Data connections. I suspected that the 2.2 upgrade had caused a problem, but I couldn't work out what that problem might be.

Here, thankfully, the Dell forum (i.e., the users, not Dell itself) came to the rescue.

This was also an interesting example of what I shall, perhaps unfairly, call a typical (unhelpful) "expert's response", and the alternative, a helpful "intelligent user's" response (i.e., a response from someone who had suffered the problem).

Here's the original problem:

"I've had my streak about 10 days and for the first 9 days everything was great. Yesterday I stopped being able to connect to 3G, EDGE, GPRS networks and there is no icon in the top task bar. My settings show "enabled". AT&T sees no reason not to have it on their end and thought it my be corrected with a software update. Any suggestions? Wireless works fine, but I'm not always in a wireless zone. Should I do a factory reset?"

And here's the response from "Dr Android".

"Have a look at your APN settings. Also delete any APNs not being used."

Perfect grammar, and utterly useless.
However, such is the dominance of this kind of unhelpfulness (I know, I'm being unfair, Dr Android is doing his best to help, but his brain simply can't make the leap to that for someone not entrenched in the system) that people actually apologize for failing to understand something which they can't be expected to understand.

At the risk of sounding really dumb - when you say check the APN setting, what am I checking for?

.
Later on in the thread, we get a guy who had suffered the problem, and knew how to explain what to do.

Select Settings>Wireless And Networks>Mobile networks>Access Point Names. The APN list was found to be empty, but touching the "menu" button gave me a "Reset to default" option and selecting this populated the APN list with three "Vodafone Internet" APN possibilities. Selecting one of these (at random!) seems to have done the trick!

And, indeed, that was precisely the problem that I was suffering, and following these directions (not much longer than "Check your APN settings") enabled me (and, I would guess, most users) to solve my problem.

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On the brighter side, Android 2.2 offers Swype, something that I very nearly paid cash for a few weeks ago. Swype is a keyboard input system that uses sliding as well as tapping, and it speeds up input on a screen-based keyboard by a factor of anywhere between 2 and 100.

Of more interest is the guide on the Swype web page. Now, THIS is how Help files and "product tours" should be done. A collection of short videos, clearly explained by the voice-over.

I mention this because, if Swype can do it, surely other companies can too? Just knock off the Swype system and apply it to your own software. If Microsoft adopted this technique for Office 2007, it would be a joy to learn.

So, it can be done.

Meanwhile, Android continues to generate icons that, slowly, I am coming to understand and remember. At the beginning it was also (loudly) telling me every time a new e-mail arrived (a bit of a bummer when you get emails for Facebook responses, 2+2 responses and LiveJournal Responses). Under Android 1.6 you had to manually refresh. I worked out how to tell it to collect emails only once every half and hour, and not to bother to beep or vibrate or sing and dance when it did so.

While pressing meaningless icons to discover what they do I managed to put in a five-minute call to the callback number 901 without realizing it. Luckily I returned to the relevant screen and saw that the button "End Call" was still lit.

So, it would be nice if all of this was easy and effortless, but, once you get used to using the darned thing, it is, in the main, remarkably good. It's already faster to check my emails on the phone than to go to the web-page on the PC. There would appear to be a number of options for PC Browser/Device integration that I might, one day, look into more deeply. Unfortunately it seems to require that I use either Google Chrome or Firefox. I use neither of these as a matter of course, although I quite like Chrome when I do use it.

It's reported that the Dell Streak processor struggles with Android 2.2 when the operating system is running at full blast, and apparently this can cause lock-ups. That could well be a fundamental flaw with the Dell Streak, but I accepted when I bought it that one of the penalties for early adoption was paying rather more than do later adopters. If I have to buy another mini-tablet within a couple of years, so be it.

The Samsung Galaxy certainly looks like a potential rival, but I expect that even better machines of precisely the format that I want will soon become available.