Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi Tablet Review Part 3 – The Second Day…
Okay, I have now been the proud owner of the Xoom WiFi for a little more than a day now and have a few more observations. As a reminder, I’m looking at the Xoom through the eyes of a first generation iPad owner, so while a direct comparison is not my goal, it is going to be somewhat unavoidable in some areas.
Having held the Xoom now for awhile, I noticed something interesting about the case. It is rounded slightly on the left and right sides, but remains fairly thick in the center. The upshot of this is that while the Xoom is relatively comfortable to hold in landscape mode, when held in portrait mode, it is just not that ergonomic. It is clear that Verizon envisioned the Xoom to be used primarily in landscape mode, but this presents a bit of a challenge as until more tablet-specific Android applications appear we are going to be relying largely on Android apps written for smartphones which are often used in the portrait mode. One clear example of this issue is the beta version of feedly, an RSS reader absolutely refused to go into landscape mode on my Xoom despite the fact that this beta is supposed to be designed for tablet support. Granted, this will evolve over time, but it is somewhat annoying right now.
When compared to the iPad, the Xoom has one really great feature and one glaring omission in terms of user interface. The really great feature is the ability to drop live widgets on my desktop. I have a couple of news application widgets (CNN & USA Today), an email and Droidin (Linked In client) widgets all running on my primary home page. I don’t have to open any apps to get a quick snapshot of what is going on. The glaring omission is the ability to organize applications into folders. What is odd is that while Android 2.2 and before has the folder capability, for some reason, it is not enabled in Android 3.0. I know that there are multiple screens where one can place applications, but I really miss the foldering functionality which I used pretty heavily on my iPad to keep my apps grouped by category. This may also get fixed in a later release of Android, but for now, it isn’t there.
Much ado has been made about the inclusion of Flash on the Xoom. I can happily report that many web sites that either did not work at all or that worked with issues on the iPad render in all of their flash glory on the Xoom. Unfortunately, there are some exceptions including Hulu, which seems to be able to identify it is running on a tablet and refuses to play any videos (likely as an inducement to consider coughing up for Hulu Plus).
Speaking of media, this is definitely one area where Android has some work to do. Love it or hate it, iTunes provides a consistent interface across the Apple spectrum of products for synchronizing all of your digital files and podcast subscriptions. To have the same functionality in Android requires the blending of a number of different Android apps. On the music front, the Xoom shops with an excellent music player, but the same cannot be said for the video player app, which is basically the camera application placed into playback mode. The app could not find either of the two test video files that I copied to Xoom, but fortunately, there is a free player, QQPlayer, which filled the gap nicely. It was capable of playing back two h.264 video files that I had encoded for use on my iPad with no problems.
How you choose to interact with you media may determine how happy/not happy you are with the Xoom. Generally speaking, for videos, I like to copy a few encoded mp4 files onto my mobile device when I go on trips. It is really easy to do this on the Xoom – just browse to the Movies folder on your Xoom and copy the files to it. On the iPad, you first have to import them into iTunes and then set them up to sync to your iPad. It works, but it is cumbersome and takes a fair amount of time. If, on the other hand, you want to keep a nice audio library on your PC and want to automatically sync your Xoom to it, then you will need to use some sort of third party application to make this happen. Windows Media player thinks that it can do it, but I did not try an actual sync to verify that it does work.
Alright. that wraps up this part of the review. I’ll probably check back in a few days after I’ve done some more tire kicking with a final review wrap up.
Apple, iPad, Mobile, Motorola, Xoom