Dell Streak 7 now available for $200 on contract, $450 without

T-Mobile announced two days ago that the Dell Streak 7 would be available on February 2, 2011 (today). The tablet will cost you $200 if you sign a two-year contract and send in a $50 mail-in rebate. If you want to avoid the contract completely, you'll have to shell out $450.

The Dell Streak 7 runs Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo) on pretty decent hardware: a 7-inch WVGA display with Gorilla Glass protection, Nvidia's dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2, 16GB of internal memory (expandable by up to 32GB via an SD card slot), and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera accompanied by Qik Video Chat. The Streak 7 will be marketed as T-Mobile's first 4G tablet, meaning it will run on the carrier's HSPA+ network.

The Dell Streak 7 is essentially a bigger version of the original 5-inch Dell Streak, which sold for $500-$580 unlocked. It shipped with the outdated Android 1.6, and the company was readily criticized for it. Three months ago, Dell started offering the device with Android 2.2.

We're thus quite disappointed that the Dell Streak 7 isn't shipping with Android 2.3 (codenamed Gingerbread), at the very least. Given that it's a tablet, it should really come with Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb). Still, the comparatively low price makes it a pretty attractive 7-inch tablet.