ZDNet reports that Dell is positioning its new 5” Android-powered Streak device as part of its line of healthcare IT products. Too big to be a smartphone, too small to call a tablet, the Streak nonetheless fits perfectly in a lab coat pocket. Dell promises it will “integrate seamlessly” with its other healthcare products, and has a number of useful features that will make it a handy medical data companion.
Doctors have very particular information-technology needs, complicated by HIPAA laws that are very specific about what can be done with patient information. Given that Dell already has a prominent line of medical equipment and a great deal of experience with catering to those needs, it seems to have a good chance of gaining a foothold in the market.
The Dell Streak has been underwhelming a number of tech writers so far, with its smaller-than-iPad form factor and higher-than-iPad price. (For that matter, couldn’t they have picked a better name? What next, the Dell Smudge? Come to think of it, why is Apple using fingerprints in the logo for its new iPod line? You’d think they wouldn’t want to call attention to how smudgeable those screens are. But I digress.)
Finding a niche for the Streak in the healthcare industry, which has already been looking at the iPad as a possible medical data display device, would help ease the pain if consumers are likewise underwhelmed.
Clearly, this is just the first step in the eventual development of Star Trek medical tricorders.
And yet another self-proclaimed arbiter of what’s too big and what’s too small! Where’s the evidence to support the certitude of your brash proclamation? Is there some secret market research firm that’s conducted a consumer survey and made the results available only to you and your fellow blogging luddites?? I suspect not, because the lot of you don’t seem to be gleaning anything from the evidence that is actually emerging in this sector, as companies such as Acer and Samsung are bringing similar phone-capable devices to the market – indeed the Galaxy tab is even has a couple of inches on the Streak. It seems, perhaps, that there is indeed a significant market segment out there that’s looking for a convergent device that allows them to reduce the amount of techno-crap they need to haul around. You may count me as one of them, and I’ll thank you not to speak on my behalf with respect to what is the right size/functionality component to suit my needs.