Motorola Xoom review – one month later
I had the Motorola Xoom for a month just to experience it. It was provided to me by work but only temporarily. I just transferred it to a team member so they can now experience it.
If you don’t want to read anything more, and just want me to sum up my review here it is:
I want to buy one now that it is gone but the $599 price overcame my desire as I don’t need one.
So I that means that it is definitely a useful item but it is currently overpriced in my eyes. I just bought my wife a 17.3″ widescreen HP laptop with a 4GB of RAM, a Blu-Ray, a web-cam, fingerprint reader, HDMI port, etc…It was $549. Currently there are some Android 2.2 tablets that are in the $100 to $150 range. I think in a year these tablets in the $100-$150 dollar range will be running Android 3.0 or the next version and they will be everything your need. So only spend the money if you need to.
I am going to own an Android 3.0 device soon, if for no other reason than technology is both my job and hobby so just to stay up to speed with technology, I will need one soon, just not right now.
Ok, let’s get to the positives and negatives.
Negatives
- Apps didn’t work until I restored to factory defaults.
- Wireless screen didn’t really indicate a scroll bar, took me an hour to figure out I had to scroll down to enter a password. This was the first thing my team member ran into as well.
- Some apps just crash (but many actually updated and started working, so expect app support to improve rapidly)
- Learning to type on a touch screen. It is much better than typing on a phone, not as good as a laptop.
- Didn’t fit in my suit pocket at church, maybe I should get a 7″ one for myself.
- The fingerprints on the screen were annoying and I had to clean it often.
Positives of a tablet
- Time to browse. Once you have your favorite sites, just hitting a site really quick was much faster.
- I loved the 10.1 inch screen.
- I loved replacing big books.
- A good casual game machine, especially for my 3-year-old.
Positives of the Xoom and Android 3
- Having about 5 desktops to put icons on.
- The first firmware update I received worked perfectly.
- Notification system is awesome.
- Flash web pages worked just fine.
- The email integration with Gmail.
- Plenty of disk space. (I never even used 2 GB as much is stored on the cloud)
- Multi-threading – It never once felt slow.
- Google Maps integration worked well.
Hopefully this review helps you.
If you want a cheap Android tablet, get yourself the Nook, then install Honeycomb on it. YouTube has a coupl'a videos.