Dell Streak 7 viewing angles
Depending on which review you read, the Dell Streak 7 screen's viewing angles are either pretty good or pretty bad. And depending on which angle you're looking at the display from, both assessments are actually true.
I don't know why it really matters whether a screen can be seen from the sides, top, or bottom, as I would think that most people put a device right in front of them when using it, but since wide viewing angles are what everyone seems to want, then let's take a look at how the Streak 7 succeeds and fails to give that to them.
Sidenote: I was still in the process of setting up my home screen when I took these pics, so what you see isn't my final setup. As I write this, my screens are actually still in a state of disarray because I ended up having to do a factory reset several hours after unboxing my Streak 7. It was my only option after numerous apps began force closing on me, so I'm back at square one again.
And now back to the viewing angles.
The Streak 7's screen looks downright terrible when viewed from the bottom.
The screen darkens, colors become unrecognizable, and it's just plain bad.
Sadly for me, this is an angle that I see a lot. I don't actually use the Streak 7 from this angle, but if I lay it on a table and then sit in front of it, this is what I see when I look down unless I'm hovering directly above it. I suppose I'll get used to it over time but right now I keep lifting it up or changing my position so that I have a front-and-center view and can verify the true colors. I guess it makes me think that something happened to my screen, so I keep having to check to make sure that everything is still fine.
The screen fares much better when viewed from the left and right sides. Colors aren't as saturated, but they're still easily identifiable.
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Looking at the screen from the top isn't too bad either. Things tend to wash out and light colors become overexposed as the angles become more vertical.
The (obvious) bottom line is simply that the Streak 7's screen looks best when viewed head-on. Unless you're spying on what the person next to you is doing on his/her Streak 7, there aren't too many situations where you'd be looking at the screen from any other angle. The bottom-to-top angle is still a bummer, though.
