Dell has confirmed the departure of the Streak 5 tablet, one of the smallest versions of Android tablets available in the market.  Dell announced the end of the Streak 5 via an image on its Streak 5 tablet web page which says “Streak 5 is no longer available. Goodbye, Streak 5. It’s been a great ride.”  The Dell tablet webpage continues to trade Streak 5 accessories, and the Streak 5 page also refers users to other Dell tablets.

The Streak 5 was launched last year with an outdated Android 1.6 version.  After the launch, Dell was criticized by tablet users for the integration of an outdated Android platform, which does not support the newest, sexiest Android features, mainly Flash. There was also a problem in the tablet cum smartphone, the battery life. Dell later updated the tablet with Android 2.2 (Froyo) with an over the air update.

The Dell Streak 5 tablet which was available till couple of months back has disappeared from retail stores and wasn’t available from Dell marketplace and the company had stopped taking fresh orders for the Streak 5.

The Streak 5, designed for use as a smartphone and a tablet, runs Android 2.2 on a 1-Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G and sports a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash.

Dell launched a 7-inch Android-powered Streak tablet in February, smaller than Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad.  The Dell Streak 7 runs on 2.2-GHz Nvidia Tegra Dual Core processor and has built-in Wi-Fi, and access to T-Mobile’s 4G mobile broadband network. Continuing its Streak series, Dell launched a 10-inch Android tablet, the Streak 10 Pro, exclusively for the Chinese market prior to a US launch, six months after launching the 7-inch Android tablet. The Streak 10 Pro is powered by the Android Honeycomb OS and has a 10.1-inch (1280 x 800) multi-touch display, and a 1GHz dual core nVidia Tegra 2 processor. It offers 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel back camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.

Dell with its Streak Pro 10 will compete with Apple’s iPad 2 in international market in particular.  It will also face competition from Samsung’s ultra-thin tablet, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is expected to be launched in China this month.  HP is set to launch its Touchpad tablet in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong this month. Samsung also released its next version of the popular Galaxy Tab series, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, in the Indian market this week.

Aside from tablets, Dell launched the Latitude XT3 tablet PC this week, hoping to leverage the best of the tablet and laptop. Latitude XT3 is a laptop-tablet combo with touchscreen capabilities that recognizes 4-finger controls, stylus, and track-stick controls. The Latitude XT3 runs on Windows 7 Professional (64 bit), Intel Core i3 2.1 GHz processor, with 2GB of RAM and 250GB of internal storage.