Hasta La Gadget!

Dell’s Android-powered Streak is an intriguing device. Billed as a tablet but priced and sold like a phone, the Streak has more in common with the HTC Evo and Droid X than it does with the iPad.

Teardown specialists iFixit decided to drill into the Streak to see what its internals look like.

Dell has designed the device so that a mechanical engineering degree is not required for a successful disassembly, says iFixit, which was able to reverse engineer the assembly process within minutes.

The Streak’s 5-inch LCD screen has a layer called ‘Gorilla Glass’ on top that is scratch resistant and durable. The LCD is bonded to the front panel glass to increase the strength of the device, as well as the sensitivity of the capacitive touch panel. But that is also likely to increase the cost of fixing the device if you break just the glass.

The front panel’s construction means the device should be able to withstand drops from above waist height, says iFixit.

The 1530 mAh battery on the Streak is easily replaceable and is covered with a sheet of steel, rather than plastic, to decrease its overall thickness.

Streak has a second 2 GB microSD card near the top of the motherboard that holds system and applications files.

The “C”-shaped motherboard of the device comes out easily after disconnecting some cables, says iFixit, and all components are attached to this motherboard.

Overall, the Streak rates high for the ease with which its battery can be replaced and the use of standard connectors for the cables.

But the rear panel feels cheap, says iFixit, and deforms easily. That’s disappointing for a device that costs nearly $600.

Story continues.

Elements is a new iPad text editing app that syncs with your Dropbox. Another one? Yes, but this one is at once simple, functional and a lot of fun to use. It is also a universal app, so you can buy it once and use it across all your iOS devices. The core of Elements is a super-simple plain text editor which saves and reads files directly to and from Dropbox, a (free) online sync and storage service. This means that any new documents, and any changes you might make, are immediately available on any other device connected to the Dropbox account, or on the web. Elements saves changes every 30-seconds and, if you’re offline, will sync next time you connect. If you drop a TXT file into the Elements folder of your Dropbox, it will show up in the iPad app.

You can choose a color scheme, change fonts and sizing, but it’s the details that really make this stand out as a great portable writers’ tool. First, it supports Textexpander, an app which expands typed snippets into longer texts. For example, if I type “gl” it immediately changes to “Gadget Lab”, according to my settings. It is essential for writers. Elements also shows you word, character and line counts in a popover, and will email your TXT files as attachments.

The other standout feature is the scratchpad, a popover panel which lets you type a quick note or paste a paragraph to use later. It should be standard in any app, mobile or desktop, which uses text.

What it doesn’t do is let you do fancy formatting, or search within your files. It won’t even let you search those files by title. But that’s not early the point. Elements is, as it’s name may suggest, a bare-bones text-editing machine.

One hidden feature is file versioning, which comes courtesy of the Dropbox storage. Here’s an example. Say you are writing a review of a new iPad app, and you are writing it in that same app. Say that the Internet connections are flaky and somehow you lose all your work but the first two lines. Then say you panic a little (you may have already guessed that this is a true story that happened a few minutes ago). Stay calm, wait for the Dropbox website to load up and go chase down the version with the most text in it. Make sure Elements isn’t in use, click restore and you’re back where you were. Thank God.

I like Elements a lot so far. It lacks the tabbed document view of Simplenote on the iPad, which makes popping between documents to copy and paste a breeze. The word-count features, versioning and scratchpad, though, make it useful in other ways. $5.

Elements [iTunes]

Elements [Second Gear]

See Also:

• Simplenote and Notational Velocity Bring Document Syncing to iPad …
• Simplenote Update Finally Syncs iPhone Notes With Mac
• Hands On: iPhone Note Taking Apps Improve, But Still Not Ready …
• 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You Away
• Dropbox Updated for iPad, External Editing Added
• Dropbox Brings Cloud Storage Within iPhone's Reach

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

A Wacom-style graphics tablet for the Wii? It’s a fantastic idea, and if THQ, the maker of the uDraw, can make it work as well as a Wacom, it could have a winning peripheral.

The tablet, officially a “GameTablet”, has a slot onto which you slide the Wiimote, and this allows it to communicate with the console and also powers the tablet. The pen is tethered (a good thing, otherwise the kids would lose it in five seconds), and lets you draw on a 9 x 7-inch panel.

The uDraw will cost $70 and will ship with a game called uDraw Studio, a painting app which also uses some of the Wiimote’s buttons as controls: hit the minus-button to undo a brush-stroke, for example. It all looks worthily educational, and has the bonus that you won’t have to clutter the beautiful door of your SMEG refrigerator with the paper detritus of your kids’ scribbling sessions.

THQ has some more titles on the way already. A draw-along platformer called “Dood’s Big Adventure” (which sounds awful) and a version of Pictionary, which could be a genius move from THQ.

The uDraw will ship at the end of this year, almost certainly in time for Christmas. The games will follow, for $30 apiece, in 2011.

uDraw [Wonderful World of uDraw via Yahoo]

See Also:

• Fingers-On With Wacom's Multi-Touch Tablet

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

As MSI’s WindPad 100 edges closer to stores, photos of the Windows 7-based tablet have been released. The little slate even comes with its own dock that adds in all the ports that you’d expect from a netbook, plus a handy HDMI-out.

The WindPad isn’t really a netbook, though. It uses an Intel Atom Z530 processor, part of Intel’s Silverthorne line. These processors are made for MID computers, or Mobile Internet Devices, and sip very little battery power. The Z530 is the least thirsty of these, needing a maximum of 2W to keep it ticking along.

When not docked, the WindPad is as simple as a tablet should be, with a 10.2-inch screen, 32GB SSD drive and 2GB RAM. The price, when it ships in September, will almost certainly be $500. That, it seems appropriate to point out, is the same as the base iPad. Clearly, though, these are two very different machines: one a mobile device, the other a desktop device in a tablet form-factor. I wonder if this kind of device is even appropriate for a demanding, full-featured desktop OS? We shall see next month.

Official Shots of the MSI WindPad 100 Tablet In [NetBook News]

See Also:

• MSI Wind-Pad, a Featherlight Multitouch Tablet
• Asus, MSI Tablets Lead the Charge Against the iPad
• Windows Phone 7 Series Tablet Concept
• Asus Drops Windows for Android in Eee Pad Tablet

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

The Axon Haptic is a tabula rasa of a tablet. It comes as an empty, OS-less shell, waiting for you to install your choice of operating-system. The hardware of this ten-inch tablet is designed to work with almost any OS, from various Linux flavors through Windows to OS X. Yes, this little baby is hackintosh-ready.

The trick is the EFI bootloader, which is what lets the machine boot into a Darwin OS (of which OS X is the best known example). This is the tricky part of any hackintosh installation, and it essentially tricks the Mac OS into thinking it is running on Apple hardware.

The machine itself is pretty much a stock netbook, only with a resistive touch-screen and in a tablet form-factor. It packs a 1.6-GHz Atom N270 processor, the ten-inch screen, a 320GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a webcam, optional Bluetooth and – yes – a stylus. The is also an optional “3G CDMA Verizon SIM slot”, which is odd because CDMA doesn’t use SIMS.

It’s an interesting take, and will presumably fall outside of Apple’s legal reaches if it actually makes it into stores. Then again, maybe there’s no market for this kind of thing. Remember the Psystar “Mac”? That was hardly a runaway success.

The Haptic is available for pre-order now, for an optimistic $750.

Axon Haptic [Axon Logic via CrunchGear]

See Also:

• Psystar 'Rebel EFI' Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any PC
• EFiX Dangles Hacking Dongle Before Apple's Lawyers

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.