Dell Streak 5 tablet gets the axe

Haha, that's totally what I just said! :P

You posit that Apple could have slowed "androids rise." From here it is hard to argue that Android has had any rise at all. Therefore I think they have in fact, slowed it.

Selling millions of free semi-smart phones to people who never use the smartphone features because your OS is the default is not "rise." And managing to have to pay your competition for every sale of your free OS is not a good profit model. Numbers alone do not a successful platform make.

I'm not sure it is worth repeating, since your point about carriers has very little to do with the article or anyone's comment on the article. I mean you're right: AT&T exclusivity probably did hinder iPhone adoption notionally. However since both the iPhone and iPad have often sold to the limit of Apple's manufacturing capacities, I doubt that Apple could have done a much better job with more carriers. On the other hand, the upside of exclusivity was that it gave Apple the leverage to build the device it wanted, with features that carriers wouldn't allow (like visual voicemail) at the time and without carrier bloatware and branding. So there are tradeoffs.

If exclusivity was iOS's big weakness, the Dell Streak 5 presents one of Android's big weaknesses. The Streak was a big phone. It had a phone OS and phone apps, and when you bought it, you signed up for service like you were buying a phone. Instead of branding it as a maxi-phone, they said "Apple has a good thing going with the iPad, let's tell people that it's a tablet." Android manufacturers spent much of last year pulling this BS, releasing 5-7 inch "tablets," pretending they were innovating with a new form factor when the reality was that Android couldn't handle a larger screen at that point. After a year of arguing that what consumers wanted was 7" "tablets," suddenly Honeycomb comes out and all the major Android manufacturers have their 10" iPad clones coming out, and most of the mini-tablets they spent 2010 touting as iPad killers are forgotten. Some, like the Streak 5, are officially discontinued, others, like the 7" Galaxy Tab I own are just kind of abandoned: promised accessories quietly canceled, OS can't be updated without rooting it; still useful, but it has no future. That whole generation of mini-tablets was just a stalling tactic rushed out to market until the Android world could get its crap together and really compete in the tablet space. If you paid full iPad price for one of these stopgap devices, you might be sore not just at Dell or Samsung, but at the Android ecosystem in general, because Google doesn't look out for consumers like Apple does.

As for losing customers forever, consider this: iOS users buy apps, where Android users famously don't. That means that the barriers of going from Android to iOS are pretty low, since most Android users don't have a portfolio of paid apps they'd have to replace if they switched.

Well the article did say ALL ANDROID TABLETS have sold less the 2 million. I think that should answer your question unless those expectations where on 153 tablets.