Before you light up the comments, make sure to read the first part of this review, in which I give my overall assessment, i.e. I really like the Xoom and think it’s an important piece of consumer electronics.
To list the Xoom’s issues, I’m using the classic euphemism from our school days. So, let’s jump right into the stuff that needs improvement.
Hardware
Oh boy, the cameras aren’t very good, and I’m not any kind of photography aficionado. I’m such a n00b that I can’t even describe accurately what sucks about the cameras, front and back.
They should be fine; the back camera is 5 MP, the front 2 MP. The camera app is greatly improved from the stock camera app in earlier versions of Android.
But the pictures. Grainy. Dark, despite the dual LED flashes. Totally disappointing. See for yourself.
Maybe I'm expecting too much?
On a semi-related note, I felt completely stupid pointing a tablet at a subject to take a picture. Maybe that’s something people will get used to, but for now, it’s just silly.
Unsurprisingly, the battery drains more quickly than the iPad’s. I went several days on the first charge, with moderate usage. I debated even listing this, since Apple has raised the bar on battery life.
A bigger issue is the lack of a replaceable battery, which was a plus for Android phones. In fairness, it might be replaceable if I opened up the case, but that requires Torx screws (a la Macbooks) and is definitely not user-friendly. Check out the teardown for details.
Software
Honeycomb is something new, unlike iOS on the iPad, which ran a version behind its newest phone sibling until recently. As everyone knows, new software has bugs.
For the most part, Honeycomb has been stable, but I did hit a freak out period of about five minutes when:
1. The wifi receiver died, or so I assume, since all my apps lost connectivity.
2. The camera force closed itself and then wouldn’t reopen.
3. The CNN widget disappeared.
At which point, I forced a restart, which cleared up all these issues.
An oddity about the Camera is that its default setting is no storage, which seems very odd. After a few attempts and snapshots were disappearing into the abyss, I checked the settings. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Xoom’s SC card slot isn’t working yet.
The last thing I’ll mention is that rendering is sometimes jittery and choppy, e.g. loading a browser page sometimes winds through odd sections repeating themselves. This is quickly remedied, but it’s worth noting.
Apps
The Android Market is the source of several of my big issues.
First off, one major selling point of Android is its OTA syncing. If you’re using a Google account (and you should be), when you login to a brand new Android device, all your apps rain down from the sky like candy, the free and purchased ones alike. It’s magical. This makes switching and geeking out easy.
This is not what happened when I logged into the Xoom. Two of my many apps came over, and not automatically. No biggie right, the new Android Market should have a full list of what I have on my EVO. It doesn’t, or at least I couldn’t find one. So, I had to search for and then send each app I wanted to the Xoom.
Major bummer.
I hope I failed at something here because this is a common use case, e.g. some people buy a phone while their old one is still active. So, if the Android Market trips over multiple active devices, that’s a problem. Again, this could be user error, and I hope it is.
Another gripe with the Android Market app is that it’s highly unintuitive and forces landscape mode for some inexplicable reason.
Even though you won’t waste money buying HD versions of your favorite apps like you do with an iPad, you will miss some of the multitouch goodness that tablet iOS tablet apps have. I found myself trying to touch navigate the Twitter app simply because I’m used to how it works on the iPad.
Yes, Android users are accustomed to the back button, an underrated and overlooked feature of Android, but the tablet form factor invites you to touch it.
I do expect that Google will invest heavily in Honeycomb apps, which is perhaps why they’re hiring loads of Android developers. The Google apps for Honeycomb, including Google Body, are very nicely done. It’s unfortunate that Google will have to seed the Android Market with great apps to drum up developer interest.
For now, there just aren’t apps like Reeder for Honeycomb. I really hope that changes.
I miss Reeder on the Xoom.
Anyway, these are my thoughts. Find the comments.
