Eric Baber's blog

Yesterday I received a Dell Streak and already like it a lot. I thought I'd put down a number of impressions in writing.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, the Streak is a bigger-than-a-phone-smaller-than-the-iPad device that calls itself a "tablet". It's got a 5"/12.7cm screen, which makes the whole thing just barely fit into a shirt pocket. It'll very comfortably fit into a jacket pocket though, and it somehow feels like it's aimed at the type of person who would be wearing a (suit) jacket.

One of the first thing that strikes about it is the fact that it's designed to be used in landscape mode, unlike most phones, which are designed to be used in portrait mode. The physical home, menu and back buttons are down the right-hand side, and the home screen is always displayed in landscape mode and doesn't rotate unlike any of the other screens, so it immediately tells you what the whole machine is about - consuming content, basically, rather than making phone calls. Yes it's also a phone but my guess is that you'd look pretty silly with it stuck to your ear; used as a phone it would definitely look like a throwback to the first carphones of the 80s.

I say "you'd look pretty silly" because I haven't actually used it as a phone yet, and my guess is that I'm not alone in that. It's clearly designed for people who read and input text a lot - to that effect it's got a full (virtual) QWERTY keyboard whenever text entry is required, unlike the phone-style keyboard input of most mobiles. The expanded screen size makes inputing text much easier than on, say, the Nexus One given the increased likelihood of actually hitting the right keys; having said that, the iPhone is pretty much the same size as the Nexus One and text-entry on that is good, so maybe it's as much a software issue as a hardware one.

On that note - software - the thing that irks me most is that the Streak (in the UK at least) is still on Android 1.6 rather than 2.1 or even 2.2 like you can get on the Nexus One. Attempts to update it have so far eluded me; chances are it would take a manual update of a type "not supported by Dell", which is annoying given that it's a brand-new device.

What else. Reception is excellent - usually at work I get one or at most two bars on most of my phones. On the Streak I'm getting four and even occasionally five. Whether it's actually lying to me a la iOS who knows, but download speeds are better than on other phones I've used at my desk, so it seems to be accurate.

I've also installed Kindle and have downloaded a couple of books I'd already started reading on it. Reading on the Streak screen so far is good - I've always struggled with reading any decent amounts of text on the Nexus One or the iPhone, but this screen is big enough to display a decent amount of text in a reasonable font size which is nice. And a praise for the Kindle architecture - it's great being able to read a book on another device, close it down, fire up Kindle on another one and immediately carry on reading where you left off without having to remember where you'd got to. Very nice indeed.

As to apps, the Android Market now has everything I want, and a whole lot more. One curious thing that struck me is that when logging into the Market via the Streak it serves me up predominantly paid-for apps; when logging in from the Nexus One it serves me up predominantly free ones. Fluke? The fact that the Streak is running 1.6 and therefore perhaps supports fewer apps, and those happen to be fee-charging? I have no idea, but it's definitely a marked difference. I doubt it's as a result of the OS version - I've been able to find and install every app on the Streak I'd already had on the Nexus One, so it doesn't seem to be a matter of fewer apps being supported on 1.6. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this difference?

A minor thing - having a larger screen-size also makes it easier to keep the home and adjacent screens tidier. It's nice being able to put more of your commonly-used apps on the home screen. As I say a minor thing, but nice nonetheless.

Another not-quite-so-minor thing - I do miss the trackball that the Nexus One has. Occasionally, e.g. when scrolling through tweets on Twidroid, it's far easier to accurately scroll through and highlight content via the trackball than it is with your finger. I'm sure I'll get used to not having one, but initially I do miss it.

And finally one huge irritation - the charger is a non-standard, i.e. non-(micro) USB one. Yet another charger needed!!! How very annoying. What's wrong with micro USB, Dell??

However, on the whole, I like it. I'm still trying to decide who this machine is aimed at: it tries to - and succeeds at - integrate social networking (it has a built-in Facebook app which works better than any other one I've previously used). However, the price (£500) and size (brick) means it's unlikely to be attractive to kidz. Instead, it's likely to appeal to thirties-somethings - people who do do the social networking thing but also want something a bit heavier-weight on which to do proper e-mails and view work-related documents (it comes pre-installed with Quickoffice). A substantial market-size I'm sure, so this may well be the first of a tranche of similar devices.

If anyone else out there has used one feel free to add your own comments. And if anyone has managed to update their OS to 2.1 or 2.2 I'd love to hear how!

What an amazingly ill-informed article. Phil Beadle bemoans the loss of the old-style whiteboard to electronic interactive ones. Some choice quotes:

"But their place at the front of the class means every lesson must have a PowerPoint presentation"

Erm... no. Personally I don't think I've ever used a PowerPoint on an interactive whiteboard. PowerPoints are for presentations; in a classroom of 10 - 20 people I don't do presentations, I do teaching. Interactive whiteboards do not equal PowerPoint presentations.

"The Smart Board's central positioning destroys a teacher's ability to be spontaneous. You cannot come in any more with a couple of board markers and a handful of good ideas."

Erm... no. Turn on the whiteboard and it's blank. Write on it what you will. Go mad. The only thing that limits it is the user's creativity. If you can be creative on a blackboard, or a non-interactive whiteboard, and you can be creative on an interactive whiteboard.

"If I am modelling sentence construction or the semicolon, drawing a map illustrating colonialism in Africa, or scribing arrows outlining connections between ideas, I want to be able to do it quickly: as quick as I think"

You can do all of those things on an interactive whiteboard.

"They have their uses, Smart Boards, but they are a tool, not a teacher."

I completely agree, but precisely the same holds true of a non-interactive whiteboard.

"Their central position gives them primacy."

Again, just like the old-fashioned whiteboards.

"If you have a say, get yours put at the side of the room. Or ask for it to be given to someone more worthy; you'll make do and have your old whiteboard back."

Or ask for some training in how to use it more fully.

An electronic whiteboard is a tool, not a teacher - absolutely. But it does everything a non-interactive whiteboard can do and then a whole lot more. If a teacher feels they have to use a PowerPoint presentation in each lesson they shouldn't t blame that on the board but instead either themselves for imposing that view on themselves, or else on their management that has placed that upon them. That's not the fault of the whiteboard, but of the humans that surround it.

Interesting. Just got the following e-mail on one of the lists I'm on. Basically, Microsoft has brought out a web-based tool that allows users (e.g. learners of English) to past or write in text, and it offers corrections based on web-searches to establish possible errors and corrections thereof in the text.

It doesn't seem to work very well though; I entered the text "This sentence lots of mistakes contains. Wonder I how good this worked. " and it returned no offers of corrections. Hum...

"Members of this list may be interested in the prototype web-based
writing assistance service for ESL learners that has recently been
launched by the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft
Research. The MSR ESL Assistant uses statistical models to suggest
corrections for a set of common learner error patterns that are not
currently supported by the proofing tools in Microsoft Office
products, and tries to help users judge whether the proposed
modifications really are better by displaying actual writing examples
returned by a web search.

The MSR ESL Assistant service can be accessed at
http://www.eslassistant.com. The service is free and no registration
is required.

Further information about the project can be found on the team
website at http://research.microsoft.com/Projects/msreslassistant and
project updates will posted periodically on the team blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/eslassistant.

The service is still very experimental. We are hoping that both
learners of English and TEFL/TESL professionals will take a look at
it and will perhaps even find it useful. We look forward to feedback,
and are especially interested in hearing from educators who find ways
to incorporate this service into their instruction."

Thanks to Cleve Miller for this one.

Google has announced the release of Lively, a 3D environment, sort of similar to Second Life. The good thing about it is that it doesn't need a humongous download to operate and works from within a browser; this means that people can create their own rooms and embed them in their website or blog (as long as the blog engine allows iFrames, which mine doesn't, so I've set up a room here). The drawback is that it's still clunkier than Second Life, and only works on Windows. It's still in beta, though, so hopefully it'll go cross-platform at some point.

I very much like the idea that it's browser-based and significantly easier to use than Second Life.

A while ago the Guardian interviewed me about Voice over IP (VoIP) for language teaching; the resulting article has just been published.