Dell is set to roll out its long-rumored, 10.1-inch Streak Pro tablet in June with Android 3.0, according to an industry report. The business-focused tablet is said to run on an Nvidia Tegra 2, and offers dual cameras and up to a 64GB solid state drive (SSD).

Dell's long-rumored Streak Pro tablet  first showed up in a leaked Staples training guide in March as a nameless 10-inch Android 3.0 tablet. It will join a long list of media tablets set to roll out during the summer, as a growing number of vendors look to gain traction in the rapidly growing tablet space currently dominated by Apple's iPad.

The new device will be Dell's third tablet, joining the original, five-inch Streak and the more recent, seven-inch Streak 7 (pictured above, at right), available from T-Mobile.

Dell Streak Pro on stand, with accessories
Source: Tweakers

Earlier reports had Dell's Streak Pro being powered by Nvidia's upcoming 1.2GHz Tegra 2 T25 SoC (system on a chip), which among other things is said to be 3D-capable. However, according to a May 19 report on Dutch technology site Tweakers — as picked up and reported in English on AndroidCommunity — the device will be powered by the standard 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 T20, which does not have the 3D capabilities.

More views of the Streak Pro
Source: Tweakers

The Streak Pro will offer a 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 pixel touchscreen and weigh 1.59 pounds, according to the report. It will be available with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash memory, as well as a five-megapixel rear camera and a two-megapixel camera on the front.

There are also Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities, and a choice of a number of colors, including black, blue, red, and pink, says Tweakers. Included accessories are said to include an in-car changer, a "productivity dock," and a folding cover with an integrated keyboard.

Tablets changing PC landscape

Dell is one of several vendors that wants in on a tablet space that market research firm Gartner has said will grow from almost 70 million in sales this year to 294 million in 2015. The challengers to Apple are coming from both the PC world — Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Acer, for example — and the smartphone space, including BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, Motorola, and Samsung.

For Dell and HP, tablets are a way of expanding their reach in the industry beyond the PC. On May 17, executives with both companies, while announcing quarterly earnings, said they saw revenue drops in their consumer PC businesses, though sales of their commercial PC units were healthy.

In recent months, analysts have been debating the impact of tablets on sales of traditional laptops, but so far there appear to be too many uncertainties at play for a firm fix on the market. Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, in a May 17 blog post, said tablets were part of the problem facing Dell, HP and Acer, but not the biggest.

"Tablet cannibalization is only a minor contributor to soft PC sales," Epps wrote. "The bigger factor is the Windows release cycle — so many consumers bought new PCs when Windows 7 came out, and without a new version of Windows this year, there isn't the same catalyst to buy."

During a May 17 conference call with analysts and journalists to announce his company's earnings, Dell CEO Michael Dell questioned whether tablets would see high adoptions rates in businesses. Dell said that tablets are the third device choice — after smartphones and PCs - "and you can't find a lot of companies that are going to have three devices for all of their users. We're not seeing tablets replacing the smartphone or the PC in large numbers in organizations."

HP CEO Leo Apotheker, in HP's earnings conference call, said his company has felt the impact of smartphone and tablet sales on the consumer PC business, and reiterated the company's intent to roll out its WebOS-based TouchPad this summer.

Jeffrey Burt is a writer for eWEEK.

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