With competition notably intensifying in both the tablet as well as the smartphone arena, the Friday debut of the Dell Streak – the smartphone/tablet device – is apparently a new niche device to have hit the market.

The Dell Streak – priced at almost $300, with a two-year AT&T contract or unlocked for $549, though still SIM-locked to AT&T – has chiefly been marketed as a tablet device, much hyped as somewhat of a hybrid mix between the iPhone 4 and iPad.

Featuring a 5-inch screen and 19 GB of storage capacity, the Streak appears to be a unique device when compared with most of the other smartphones that are currently available in the market.

By and large, the early reviews of the Dell Streak have mostly been positive ones; however, with one of the biggest offsetting factors being that the device runs the version 1.6 of the Android operating system. In addition, one of the other complaints pertaining to the Streak is that the device is far too big to be considered a smartphone. 

Dell apparently has a solution ready for resolving the operating system issue – it is planning to upgrade the Streak directly to the latest Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’ version; thereby giving a miss to the upgrade to Android 2.1 Éclair.

With Dell having recently announced that an update patch will soon be provided for the Streak users, potential consumers who were waiting for the OS upgrade can now go in for the purchase the tablet device.