Motorola XOOM: A Third Look

So the big difference between then and now is that I bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 and wow does that purchase ever change things. The SGS2 makes almost every device on the market that isn’t a variant of the SGS2 look bad and this handedly includes the XOOM. Other than some very tablet-specific apps (like those that take advantage of fragments) and for applications where resolution changes everything, there’s almost nothing that the SGS2 can’t do better than my venerable “old” XOOM.

Other than the Iconia A500 (cheaper) and the newly released Transformer Prime (far more advanced), there isn’t a 10” tablet on the market for me. The Galaxy 10.1 is a nice tablet – gorgeous even, but I need my microSD. At 4-8GB a pop for 1080P movies, the built in storage fills up real fast! And while I don’t use my tablet on a daily basis anymore, for anything beyond alarm, bedtime music streaming, mileage tracking and the occasional tower defense, it still love it.

It still comes down to the accessories and in particular, the multimedia dock. While I dislike the fact that I have to line up three sets of connectors or how, whenever you have something plugged into the micro-HDMI port of the speaker dock, it autoroutes the audio to the micro-HDMI – even if your TV is turned off  or how there is no connect-to-PC-via-dock option, the multimedia dock just plain works. Of course, how hard is it to create a chunk of plastic with some common ports…

That being said, I don’t particularly like the docks for the competition – they all seem to focus on keyboards and, outside of the Transformer Prime (which was built from the ground up around this keyboard dock), I don’t particularly care for the keyboard (I prefer Bluetooth keyboard) – to be frank, I do most of the typing from my phone anyways.

The tablet sees the most use (outside of a temporary movie-player and bedside audio-clock) as my in-car navigation and music. That leaves one gripe: the headphone jack and the power jack are on opposite sides of the device (like the SGS2) – which makes for a damn mess of cables in my car.

I should note that I’m not using the stock kernel for my XOOM and that I’ve had microSD card support since day one. Had I not had this functionality, I would probably hate this device a whole lot more. I was recently playing around with a Galaxy Tab where it had support for reading the microSD card but didn’t’ have support to write to it. So annoying.

One solid thing I like about my XOOM is the over/underclocking options available to it – and the tablet runs stable at 312/200 MHz which gives me a ludicrous battery life. On the other extreme, it’ll overclock to 1.6GHz (I’ve not tried 1.7GHz, just never get around to it) perfectly fine for hours on end. The flexibility I get from that is priceless.

Having used the SGS2, the XOOM is very lackluster (all Tegra2 devices are lackluster in comparison really), but I would still want to have a tablet because the phone form-factor, while nice, doesn’t lend itself well to many tasks that either require a bit more resolution or a bit more in terms of physical size.

The real question is whether or not, I would have wanted a 10” tablet or the current favorite, 7”. The 7” tablet world is a completely different animal as they are much more portrait friendly (to the point where it can be natural to have the device in portrait mode even, something unthinkable on a 10” tablet).

I guess when I get a 7” tablet, I’ll revisit this again but it’s very nice to see how much the industry has progressed since I bought my 10” tablet.