Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom | Hacker News Reader

Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom

arstechnica.com

28 pointssoundsop37 comments

I checked out a Xoom in person at a Verizon store today - a kiosk in a mall, so Xooms are definitely out there. It feels and looks like quality hardware. They're solid feeling, and not too thick. The back isn't entirely flat, which is odd compared to Apple products. I couldn't get a feel for the weight as it was attached to that cell phone store cording.

I had a hard time figuring out how to get it to come on off of standby - there are no buttons on the sides besides volume, no button on the top (a plastic cover I thought might be a button, though) and unlike Android phones, no visible software buttons. It turns out there is a little round button on the back with a 'power' logo on it.

The home screen is neat looking. It shows an interesting mild 3-d cube effect when you flip between panes. I'm not sure if I like how the buttons (in the lower left) are only in software, and can change.

The browser seemed adequate to me. Pinching to zoom seemed a bit weird; one time I ended up in some other application and I'm not really sure what happened.

The Xoom also had Winamp installed (Winamp?) and the usual photo gallery, applications menu, etc. There is a special 'windows' menu that shows you open applications, which seemed convenient.

I think I would like a tablet a bit smaller than this, actually. I also checked out a Galaxy Tab, and it was pretty snazzy. Of course, there's always the iPad 2 coming out soon... while I like my Android phone, I love my iPod Touch. not sure what it is, something intangible.

I'm not surprised to hear that Ars thinks it seems a bit unfinished. My Motorola phone (a Droid 2) feels a bit unfinished, too. I had to return the first one I had for some problems with the camera, and the slightly newer one I have now is much more polished. Not sure why Motorola is in such a rush - it hurts their reputation.

    > The back isn't entirely flat, which is odd compared to Apple products.

The iPad's back isn't flat either: http://www.gadgetvenue.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/apple-... -- at its thickest point it's about twice as thick as the edge.

I mean there's a bit of a protrusion - if I recall correctly, there's an oval shaped area about the length of a finger sticking out about 1/2 cm. The power button is on this area.

I checked one out a few days ago too and I agree that the power button is very badly placed - it literally took me several minutes to figure out how to turn it on. Of course, once you know where it is isn't not an issue, but it's not the best first impression. I imagine most people will fumble around the sides for a few seconds before they just give up and move on to the iPad.

That's exactly what I did the first time I saw it - I tried to turn it on for a while, then figured Verizon must have it turned off and walked over to the Galaxy Tab.

14 hours of standby battery life? Is this normal for tablets with mobile data?

I feel that having to plug the tablet in every night would seriously limit m usage of it--especially on travels. One thing I love about my (Wifi-) iPad is that you can just pick it up instantly any time. If it would regularly run out of juice while not being used this would hinder that use case a lot.

That was a typo. Motorola's specs say 14 days. I also wondered about that!

I rarely charge my iPad more than about every two or three days. I'd have to use it pretty heavily to charge it every day.

Couldn’t you just turn off 3G data? I know that’s possible with the iPad.

Although the Xoom performs well, its reliability leaves a lot to be desired. During a week of very heavy use, I had between 5 and 8 incidents of applications force-closing every day. The issue wasn't isolated to third-party applications—Google's own software crashed pretty regularly.

[...]

Android in general is not especially robust, but the stability issues I encountered on the Xoom seem worse than the relatively minor stability problems I've had over the past few years with my various Android phones. I imagine that the stability problems will be ironed out as Google improves the platform.

And I would want to put up with this because ... ?

Waiting on promised fixes from Google, Motorola, or Verizon doesn't strike me as worth the money.

(And, no, I'm not arguing in favor of Apple's iOS devices. In fact, I feel poorly served by both Apple and Google - egregious policies on the one hand, and poor workmanship and customer service on the other.)

This review again shows what Apple is really really good at: Polishing a product and not promising stuff that doesnt work in the end.

Yeah, I love my white iPhone.

Any other, more substantial examples?

Push Notifications is the only other one I can think of. It took over a year from announcement to actual launch.

The iPhone 3G update to iOS 4? I hear it's almost working acceptably now after three minor updates.

It's still slow, almost unusable sometimes and iOS 4.3 won't come for 3G, so I guess we have to live with that.

First time I hear of that. No problems on my third generation iPod touch.

Some of the 3rd Generation touches had the same processor power as the 3GS, some didn't and, as I recall, had the same issues as the 3G. I'm surprised you didn't hear about this, it was very big news at the time since the original update rendered many phones near to bricks.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ios4+iphone+3g

Not off the top of my head. They're definitely better than most companies at avoiding overpromising, but they occasionally do it too.

The fact is that the Xoom will fail because it can't compete with the iPad in terms of cost or ecosystem. The iPad has nearly 70,000 apps designed for it. The Xoom, not so much. Plus, it costs more than a 3G+WiFi iPad with the same amount of storage and it requires a month of Verizon 3G service even if you will never use it. The bottom line is that the iPad killer is out there. This just isn't it.

The Xoom comes with its own proprietary power adapter

GODDAMMIT!!! Why?!?

standard usb doesn't deliver enough power to charge large tablet batteries in reasonable time. the nook color has a mini usb power port but the nook color charger is extended with extra pins to charge at ~2000 mah.

Tne Nook's solution is the right one. I assume you can still charge, albeit at a slower rate, using a standard mini usb cord from a computer then?

Slow charging is better than no charging, being able to just use good old USB when the need arises is key for any mobile device. I just refuse to buy anything anymore that doesn't charge from micro or mini-usb.

I wish Canon would get on the bandwagon and allow recharging of their cameras in the same way.

The obvious response is that it should offer dual USB ports for charging.

It would be pretty easy to design a connector with two (mini|micro)usb male connectors on top of each other. Then you could trickle-charge to a single port from a normal USB connector and charge properly from the double-connector.

I believe 2000mah charging would require four usb ports

So, how does loading music on an Android device usually work? Do you usually have to drag over files to the mounted SD card? That seems awfully archaic to me, I want my neatly organized music library to sync 1:1 without me having to do anything. Also: Is internal and SD storage treated as one big blob of storage or do I have to micromanage? Do I have to split my 40GB music library in half and copy half of it to the internal memory and the other half to the SD card or will whatever syncing applications are available manage that for me?

So, how does loading music on an Android device usually work?

Plenty options. My favorite is TuneSync[1] which syncs your iTunes playlists over Cable or Wifi. There's also DoubleTwist (an iTunes clone) and about a dozen other options, some of which let you mount the phone as a filesystem, some specialize in syncing playlists with various apps.

The nice thing about TuneSync is that it can be configured to automatically attempt a sync whenever Wifi is enabled, or at regular intervals. That means in practice it will just sync whenever it comes near the computer. I sometimes quickly adjust my playlists in iTunes before leaving the house - and they sync while I'm already half out the door.

[1] http://highwindsoftware.com/

> I want my neatly organized music library to sync 1:1 without me having to do anything.

I'm longing for an intelligent way to sync. I have just now 200 GB of mp3s (and I'm not alone, nor exceptional, and I still have several hundreds CDs to convert), so syncing 1:1 simply can't work at all until we have terabytes in our portable devices.

Smart playlists work quite nicely and as a fallback dragging over files works just as nicely inside applications with music libraries as in the filesystem (maybe even nicer because those applications are tailored to browsing music, also changes to the metadata sync automatically).

I’m luckily still under 64GB (about 39GB, I sync 256kb/s AAC files because I can’t hear the difference) and it looks like my storage needs will grow slower than available SSD storage.

At least I think that’s the case. My music library grew by about 8GB in the last year but 2010 has been an exception. It’s usually around 3GB since about 2000 (I was twelve back then). If my music library continues to grow by 8GB I have until 2013 to get something larger than 64GB. That should be doable.

iTunes can "automatically fill free space with songs" on iOS. I don't know if it ranks songs based on rating or plays, but I'm in the same situation as you and it's worked well for me.

There are programs to sync Android Devices (such as Double Twist), but I find it much easier to just mount the internal SD on my GalaxyS and drag and drop it. This being said, I hardly ever use my phone for music (since I also have a Zune) so it doesn't bother me much. As far as I know for my GalaxyS there is a partition on the internal storage for the "Internal SD" and the external SD is handled as a different card. Both mount separately and operate interdependently. So you would have to split that 40GB of music between both Internal and External SD cards.

If you use Linux, Banshee music player is one way. Just drag and drop songs or playlists onto the icon for your Android phone in the left menu, similar to how iTunes works iirc.

The irony; no support for loading music from Linux.

I thought Honeycomb had moved to using MTP, which is originally a Microsoft but now widely supported protocol that various Linux applications and libraries talked?

edit: reading the relevant part of the review, it is using MTP, which has built in support from Windows. Google is providing an app to add support on Mac OS X, on Linux it seems you need a recent version of libmtp and support from your music app. The link provided seems to be a way of making it appear like a mounted drive, as previous Android versions have done by default. Many small hardware music players have a firmware switch to change between USB and MTP mode so you can use either at your choice but I'm guessing that the extra SD card slot (which currently isn't working) will provide that capability for those that prefer it.

And yet there is a functioning work-around that is extremely simple: https://supportforums.motorola.com/message/332363

The forum manager (Matt) on that thread is being very cool about the whole thing; bravo, Motorola.

Can anyone please explain to me: why do all the photos of Xoom show the landscape mode? Is it even possible to use it in a document mode?

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