I've now had the chance to spend some time with the Motorola Xoom, which is the first tablet to run Goolge's Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system. Having used previous Android tablets, such as the original Samsung Galaxy Tab, it's clear that this is a huge step forward. There's a lot to like about the Xoom, but a number of concerns as well. But for this post, I'll focus on the things I liked about the Xoom, particularly in contrast to the iPad, which to date has been the dominant consumer tablet.
1. It's fast. A number of applications seemed very fast on the Xoom -- much faster than on other mobile devices I've tried, which is almost certainly due to the Tegra 2 dual-core processor. In particular, games like Dungeon Defender looked quite good, and I'm sure we'll see other higher-end games at this space. It's pretty amazing when you consider how small these devices are.
2. It multitasks very well. Applications can run in the background quite well; and you can see thumbnails or move to them quickly by pressing a window button that appears on the bottom of the screen. There seems to be a limit of five previews, but that's probably enough for most people. What's most impressive to me is that switching among the open windows is very fast.
3. Tabbed browsing is a big plus. It may be because I'm used to it on PCs, but being able to just open another tab and switch among them nearly instantly is really nice. I find it much faster than switching to a multiple-screen view on the iPad, for instance. And many people will like the ability to add an "incognito tab" for private browsing to sync their bookmarks with Google Chrome, or to see their downloads on a separate page.
4. Widgets are very handy. All the major Android devices I've seen have multiple "home screens" where you can arrange the icons for the applications you want, and add "widgets," which are like little snippets of applications. It's somewhat like the Windows or Mac desktops in that regard. Being able to put a small view of your calendar, mail items, news feeds, etc., make this quite useful. I wish Motorola included a few more options out of the box, such as a good weather widget, but it's still a great feature.
5. It has cameras. My guess is people will actually use the front-facing 2-megapixel camera -- particularly with video chat applications such as Google Talk -- and I would expect use to increase when more video-calling applications designed for the tablet come out (such as a video version of Skype). I can't imagine that will take long. There is also a 5-megapixel camera on the back with a flash, but it's hard to imagine wanting to use such a big device as a camera when most phones have as good of a camera as an option.
6. The screen is better for HD video. With a resolution of 1280 by 800, the Xoom's screen shape is well suited for 720p video, and it worked well with the included YouTube application. I don't have any magazine or newspaper applications really written for the tablet yet, but I wonder whether it will be as good for that. But still, for video, this is an improvement, and including a mini-HDMI out so you can transfer video and audio to an HDTV is a great option.
7. Multimedia looks very good. While Google's multimedia offerings don't stack up to the iTunes store (Google has a decent selection of books, but doesn't yet offer movies or music), you can use third party stores such as Amazon to get content on the device, and you can connect the Xoom to your PC to download content as well. The music application does a good job of showing album covers and letting you create playlists on the devices, and it comes with Movie Studio, a nice if basic video editing program. The fact that you can do that at all on a tablet is pretty amazing to me.
8. Android is more flexible. Over time, and not much time either, we should see lots more Android Honeycomb-based tablets from all sorts of vendors, and that should mean a lot of choices. I expect to see tablets with different screen sizes, processors, cameras (LG even has a 3D camera), and software customization. That's something Apple won't do -- for better or worse. It makes it harder for developers, but gives customers more choices. And Motorola and Google have promised Flash support, something Apple is avoiding.
So that's what I liked. In the next post, I'll talk about the 8 things I disliked.
