As part of a roundtable group set up by Marty Filipowski here at Dell in Australia and the visiting Richard Binhammer (Dell’s social media architect), I got to catch up again with Mike Hickinbotham from Telstra, as well as meet Tom Bates, who’s doing some cool stuff over at Air New Zealand, and Harry Lowes, who’s the CommBank’s head of Digital Marketing.
Much fruitful discussion occurred about the state of play here in Aus/NZ social media, as well as trends that we see happening, most of which we had time to share with various journalists invited along to ask the tricky questions.
But, for me, the coolest of the cool was getting to actually touch and play with the much-vaunted Dell Streak (see Engadget’s Streak review).
Impressions? Useful size screen (bigger than an iPhone); fits into your trouser pocket (which an iPad won’t) and with the Android application market growing in size every day it won’t be long, I’m sure, before an app comes along that allows you to edit your Word and Excel documents, as well as sync to your Outlook calendar without having to crank up iTunes.
Downsides? It sits in between the world-beating iPhone and the new ‘cool toy the cool kids have’ iPad, kind of not knowing what it wants to be, other than something that can sit in your pocket. As with the two Apple products, its fate will hinge on the application market.
Although Apple have the ‘coolness’ and ‘first to market’ factors down pat, Dell have their massive business customer base on their side, which may make this an interesting space to watch over the next few months.
No news on when the Streak will be coming to Australia, though… Bugger.
