AnandTech Motorola Xoom Review
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It's like watching all the lessons we learned about multitasking in the early 90s coming true all over again...and once again Apple is running a hair behind the competition due to various architecture decisions.
I have hope that we'll see a new iOS in a year or two though that does multitasking and notifications correctly (or at least in an appropriately Apply way).
There's still tons of room for Apple to leapfrog over Honeycomb without too much work since I'd argue that Honeycomb is the first version of the OS to out and out compete with iOS. iOS today is really a number of subtle tweaks to the original, some refinements here, a new gesture there, etc. Apple has got to have something big in the works that'll push their stuff into the next generation.
s/vi/eclipse/
Give it some time before suggesting you know exactly how users will use their tablets.
On the serious note, I am pretty sure single-app-for-single task will be dominant paradigm on tablets. And just take a look at some features of OS X 10.7…
Are you seriously suggesting that switching apps makes you more productive?
> I'd argue typical tasks on them involve only single app
I think that's absolutely ridiculous. I don't know about "productivity" since even defining that is a bit vague. I'm not trying to comment on productivity.
I'm suggesting that most users will be multitasking frequently on their tablets; or they might not be and it's just too early to know either way! Take for example what I expect to be a pretty typical use case.
You pull your tablet out and start watching YouTube videos. You've got one app open now - YouTube. An email notification comes in from a friend, it's about a funny incident found on Street View (or something). So you click on the link. You've now got three apps open: Gmail, YouTube, and Maps. The email distracted you from the YouTube video, so now that you're done with streetview you hit up HN. Four apps.
Maybe you'll go back to the YouTube video. How will you do that? On iOS you have to leave the current app - I think, I don't own any iOS devices - then slide around your homescreen until you find YouTube, then open it up.
The idea behind Android 3.0's multitasking is that you have an easy-to-access list of running applications and tasks.
I'm not suggesting people will be seriously coding on Android tablets anytime soon (but that'll happen eventually...), but I think it's pretty clear that users will very much enjoy having many things going at the same time.
Oh, so you aren't saying much then, just equivocating terms throughout the conversation. Please stop.
> "Your example does not contradict that: checking email is different task from watching youtube."
The way your personal ontology cuts the vast range of human computing endeavors into "task" units does not interest me (nor, I suspect, many people in these threads). What does interest me is my own (and their own to them). As the start of this thread clearly pointed out, the computing field learned many years back the lesson of computer multitasking. It enables a decoupling of the computer's task ontology and the user's task ontology. That is good for users, and they, like me, generally like it (as clearly evidenced by their behavior).
If you haven't been intentionally arguing for the equivalent of "being able to get more than one tool out of the toolbox at once is not helpful", then your equivocation on terms (which implied that as your position) has been noise in the conversation.
> Are you seriously suggesting that switching apps makes you more productive?
I'm curious, as I am unaware of the Apple multitasking history. (Had an 8086, and an Apple II at school; never encountered apple again until after I got an iPod and then an iPhone)
On topic: I’m not sure whether architectural decisions hamper iOS multitasking – it seems to me that the UI for multitasking in iOS just isn’t very good [0]. There are some edge cases where true multitasking would be great but I think that Apple is for the most part facing an UI problem, not an architectural problem.
[0] There isn’t much of a multitasking UI, actually. There is this horribly inaccessible row of recently accessed app icons and nothing else. If only it weren’t beneath Apple to shamelessly copy WebOS or Android.
I think multitasking UIs on touch devices (where apps are usually 100% of the screen) are more confusing for users than just going back to the icon on the home screen. Users get that more than one thing is running at a time in a windowed environment -- you can see both of them at the same time if you position your windows properly. I'm not sure they bring that understanding along when they pick up a tablet.
In theory iOS is more than capable of supporting this on the backend, but the front end architecture is a mess and would have to be significantly reworked for even this kind of basic thing (well, it seems basic on an Android device it seems so obvious there).
However, one of the reasons the platform performs well (esp. with battery life) is that the OS can kill a background process at will, and apps expect that and are usually designed to handle that gracefully. Hopefully there's more work coming to make this less of a trade off, especially as new phone versions have more resources.
The Mac was technologically out front when it came out and then for 15 years just seemed to stand still. Architectural elements like multitasking and memory management just became dated while systems like Windows made the Mac OS look archaic. Until OS X.
I think the other commenter is alluding to iOS maybe following the same trend, but this time to Android.
The shift from cooperative multitasking to preemptive was an extremely painful experience for Apple. How many failed OS projects did they have before they just threw in the towel and bought NeXT?
I hope that the modern equivalent doesn't go the same way for their mobile solution.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4191/motorola-xoom-review-firs...
The Xoom loads pages, on average, in about a quarter of the time of the iPad.
I'm guessing the software has something to do with it as well though, so you might see jumps similar to Android upgrades (visible here if you compare Xoom and Atrix) on old iPads when the new one comes out (assuming it has a new iOS rev too).
Regardless, it looks crazy fast, very curious about battery life.
Having recently worked on implementing a video solution that deploys across hundreds of sites, it's shockingly hard to find out how to play video on Android browsers. This is a bigger issue than I think most geeks realize. Most iOS devices I can download an app for all the popular video sites plus see their videos in the browser, whereas with Android I can rarely do either.
The two details I was looking for - Battery life and Display quality were both covered - no loss of battery life vs. iPad even with the great performance boost and Display isn't as good for $800 tablet.
Then there is attention to detail - the power adapter tip is very tiny and likely prone to easy breakage which would mean replacing entire power adapter.
There is a section for content transfer - quite useful to know that they switched to MTP which means no software requirement for Windows users to sync content but Mac users need to download an app for that.
Once Touchpad is out that will be the second device - strange though that it hasn't become THE way to charge.
I headed out to the Verizon store this morning to check out the Zoom tablet. I currently own an iPad, but after using the new Zoom tablet I'm just blown away by it's speed and functionality.
Regardless of what Apple releases beginning of March, Motorola and Google have definitely brought to market the first real challenger to the iPad.
Edit: I ended up purchasing a Zoom tablet and was the first to do so at this Verizon store.
I am going to hold my breath and look for reviews of the 10 inch Galaxy tab, hoping they will bring in a better display.
If the Xoom is open and hackable, go nuts. I'm sure people will create good custom ROMs (just don't expect any official ones beyond 3.1 or so). If it's locked down like the Milestone, I'd stay far far away.
1) There's no proprietary Motorola UI layer on top of Honeycomb in this instance, in contrast to their Android 2.X phones. So one might expect updates to be more prompt if updating said UI layer is a big bottleneck for their other products.
2) It's my understanding that Google folks working on Honeycomb have been using the Xoom as their reference device, so they might be inclined to make sure that it can keep up with their OS updates.
3) The Xoom bootloader isn't locked down, which is a good start.