I love my Dell Streak but I thought when I bought it last year I was going to be able to upgrade to Android 2.2. It turned out it hadn’t been released for the Streak yet. It was released last year in November and started going out to unlocked phones (I paid full price but my phone was still locked to AT&T). Supposedly it started going out to AT&T phones on February 1st. I’ve been patiently waiting for months and my patience wore out after yet another delay and I decided to go ahead and upgrade it myself – I wish I would have done it a long time ago. It took me a little while so I thought I would include the links if anyone else is ready to take the plunge.
The instructions on this page are very good. I have a i7 processor with Windows 7 64-bit and gave up trying to get it to work so I had to use an XP box.
http://www.calazan.com/how-to-upgrade-your-att-locked-dell-streak-baseband-gausb1a111231-build-6601-to-android-2-2-froyo/
Afterwards I upgraded to the latest official release since the 2.2 included with QDLTool was a prerelease. The new link on the phone for upgrade didn’t work but the link supplied in the above instructions did work.
I had backed up my apps and data using TitaniumBackup which requires the phone to be rooted. That was a piece of cake on 1.6 as UniversalRoot did a great job. However, its a little more difficult on 2.2.
First of all, I used the instructions here to get my computer to talk to the phone (went back to the Windows 7 machine).
http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/what-is-adb-and-how-to-install-it-android/
Then I found where other root programs had worked for people on 2.2 but I could not get them to work (Z4 or SuperOneClick) but I was able to root manually with the following instructions:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=844966
The instructions include copying busybox but it didn’t have a link that I saw. It can be downloaded here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?gyd9b6j556vhkv6
Overall it took me about an hour to upgrade the phone (most of which was the download) but took another three to root it (should be much faster with links provided) and another hour to restore and reconfigure.
I don’t care much for the new Dell Stage and ended up putting LauncherPro on which I like a lot. Also, although I do like the swype keyboard I found a keyboard that works great with the 5″ Streak (also comes with 7″ and 10″ versions) called Thumb Keyboard (Phone/Tablet) by Beansoft.