Well, Guess it’s Farewell to the Xoom
Well, I’ve had the Xoom for a month now, so no one can claim I did not give it a fair shake. Unfortunately, after a month of use, I feel that it has come up short in two many thing.
Now, some people tend to get cranky when one attempts to compare any tablet to the iPad. Frankly, I don’t quite understand that. Granted, the Apple haters out there certainly won’t like it because pretty much every tablet comes up wanting when compared to the iPad, But, for the vast majority of the public, comparisons are apt because the average person just wants to buy the best tablet and is not all that interested in religious arguments. For this, the iPad is hard to beat.
Let’s take a look at some of the problems I’ve had with the Xoom. First of all, when compared to the iPad, it is downright bulky. This incidentally is comparing it to the first generation iPad. When compared to the second generation iPad, it’s downright obese. The second issue is that while the iPad is really designed to be used in both portrait and landscape mode interchangeably, the Xoom really is designed for landscape mode and while it supports portrait mode, it does so somewhat clunkily. This is a major disadvantage as many existing android apps are written for the portrait mode found in phones – the predominant android platform today.
Now one interesting difference between the Xoom and the iPad is how they handle applications written for their smaller phone cousins. Whereas the iPad brings the apps up in a small window and will scale them up to fill the screen (with an attendant hit to resolution), the Xoom automatically scales them and does it well.
An issue with both platforms is that neither fully support all of the applications written for their smaller phone cousins. In Apple’s case, I have found these problems to be limited to some of the more obscure applications. On the Xoom, I found a very high profile app that does not work – the Sonos controller app for my music system. Granted that not everyone has a Sonos, so it may not be an issue to many of my readers, but as I’ve said before, the best tablet for is the one that runs the apps that you use, so here, the Xoom fails me.
Add to this list the fact that there is no Tivo app, no Wall Street Journal tablet app, no native Netflix app among others and very quickly the Xoom starts looking pretty unattractive for my needs. Now, I know that none of this is Motorola’s or Google’s fault – after all, its up to the app makers to decide whether they want to write apps for the Xoom, but in the end, a platform without support is not going to be all that useful. While things are definitely different today, a look back at Apple computer in the late 1980′s and 1990′s would have told a similar story. Sure the Mac was nice, but there were a lot more useful apps on the PC side, so that is the platform that dominated the market. We may see a similar trend in tablets. Android is a powerful operating system and has made significant inroads in the phone market, but I wonder if in part some of that success comes from the fact that for many years the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive and Android was the only really decent alternative on the other carriers.
It is of course the classic chicken and the egg story – The apps won’t come unless the platform is widely adopted by consumers, but consumers won’t buy a platform that does not have a rich app infrastructure. If android had the greenfield advantage that Apple did last year, then people might be more patient. The fact is however that consumers have a clear choice – an established platform with a rich app ecosystem or a development platform that may be months years or longer away from having the kind of app ecosystem enjoyed by its competitor. It’s really no surprise that the sales numbers are what they are.
In the end, the Xoom is damned by one more issue – I’m not confident how much support Motorola and Google plan to ultimately throw behind the Xoom long term. I’ve heard that the Xoom is the official development platform for the Android Honeycomb version, but here we are how many months since the Xoom became available and they still have not figured out how to make the SD card slot work? Gimmie a break – I seriously doubt that Apple would ever release a product with disabled features. That would offend their sense of style.
Too bad. This thing had some serious potential.
Android, Apple, iPad, Motorola, Xoom