Motorola XOOM WiFi Review (9/10)

So I got myself a tablet. There wasn’t a lot to choose from: the Apple iPad/iPad 2, Blackberry Playbook, Motorola XOOM WiFi and the Galaxy Tab. I think there may have been a few more but they didn’t catch my eye. Mind you, almost immediately after making my purchase, the ASUS Eee Transformer, Acer Iconia and new revised Galaxy Tab were announced/available. At the time the decision was down to iPad vs the XOOM. I ended up with the XOOM (the WiFi only version because [a] that’s what I want and [b] it’s the only model available in Canada at this time and [c] it’s expensive enough as is)
Why the iPad and not the iPad2? Well it’s cheaper, has the base functionality that I would want (big screen, document typing capability, basic web browsing, chat, etc.) and as a feature, it doesn’t have a camera. Wait, what? Yeah, the selling point for me is that the iPad in fact, doesn’t have a camera of any sort. One of the companies I do work for has a strict no-cameras-of-any-kind-on-site policy.

Let’s rewind: so why exactly did I even get a tablet? For a guy who used to cycle in a new [high-end] video card every week, locking myself into a platform – a seriously limited platform at that seems so, out of character. What do they mean only 1GHz dual-core tablet? Where’s my hexa-core tablet running dual video processors and a retarded amount of memory? Battery-life? Battery life be damned, performance first! What happened that that? I don’t know haha. Don’t get me wrong, while my tablet is wonderful, I wish it was packing at least twice as many processing cores, had triple the pixel count and eight times as much memory. The performance junkie in me will never die – but the tablet does have it’s benefits: I can keep it on all day and thus, avoid boot-up and shut-downs that I would have to put up with were I to carry a high-performance laptop everywhere (which, to be honest, I wouldn’t mind doing haha … the boot and shutdown times are what kill me).

It’s like going to the doctors office – you spend 15 minutes in the waiting room, and you see the doc for a whole two minutes (and now you know one of the reasons I don’t go to the doctors!). With a tablet, I get the instant-on that I am used to with the phone but much more processing capability than one could with a traditional smart phone (even if it were a bleeding edge new phone).
In the end, I chose the XOOM – it was really down to "the ability to take the iPad on-site versus having to deal with iOS” – and I didn’t need connectivity that badly.

What do I use it for?

• Bedside clock, video-player, RSS, quick-email, notes, social-networking and weather etc. – the email client is really quite wonderful (even coming from the already decent pre-honeycomb Gmail experience)
• At work I use it as an independent chat client and note taker and collaboration tool.
• It’s also great as a planning tool (like the Gmail client, the calendar is pretty wonderful too). It also serves as my main portable music device.
• Pretty much I use it for anything I would use a netbook for – except without having to worry that the device would run out of power and/or having to shutdown/boot-up.

The Good

• Honeycomb (3.0). The tablet-centric way of doing things is so very well done. If there was one standout feature of Honeycomb, it’s fragments. This really begins to blur the line between desktop and mobile – there’s a long ways to go before I abandon my desktop powerhouse, but features like this go a long ways towards making that transition much more tolerable.
• Having more of everything! Maybe it’s a by-product of getting tired of my Milestone’s limited processing resources and limited internal memory and locked-down bootloader, but the tablet is a pleasure to use: it fires up relatively quickly and consistently (no more waiting 45 seconds for the home screen to load because the phone was empty on available memory!)
• The XOOM has a unlockable-relockable bootloader! An open device is a wonderful device! This is particularly impressive for Motorola as they seem to be the most Apple-esque (at least with their high end products like the Milestone and recently the Atrix).
• The screen resolution is one I can tolerate! Granted this is a huge subjective thing but I only work really well with 16:10 aspect ratios – none of this 16:9 business!
• While we’re on the notion of screens: the XOOM is clearly designed with landscape mode in mind – because portrait mode is retarded haha (I’m looking at you iPad!)
• Typical of high-end Motorola products, there are tons of different accessories available. Being a dock-centric person, I got a few of the docks (a standard dock for the office, one for downstairs and a speaker dock for upstairs). They all work wonderfully, they have a good solid feel (at least Motorola has got their packaging department in-line and they have a great in-hand feel) and they work as advertised (although the speaker dock does take a bit getting used to – trying to line up all the connectors in the dark can be a bit tricky.
• It’s a neat thing, a novelty really, but the XOOM does pack a barometer.

The So-So

• For as fast as the tablet is, it still hiccups from time to time. Load time for more advanced games like Dungeon Defenders still takes a long time (20 seconds maybe). Perhaps it’s not a long time compared to some PC games but I certainly don’t see PhysX or HDR running at least 60fps either. It’s a relatively minor gripe which could have been easily addressed perhaps with packing 2GB of RAM instead of just 1GB.
• While not particularly Motorola’s or Google’s fault, there jut aren’t any applications really able to take advantage of the Honeycomb/tablet capability which is a shame. This will improve in time.
• While the XOOM does have a respectable battery life (advertised as 10hrs of video playback), I wish there was some form of user replaceable battery. Not because I have a concern about the battery – but because I want an extended battery! My Milestone runs full-out (screen-on, 100% brightness, gps, videos) for 23 hrs.+ (on Android 2.2.1, there was a drop going to 2.3.4). It would have been really nice, for the people who don’t give a crap about slimness to be able to shove a giant honking battery in there – so that I could eat least match my phone’s battery life running full out.
• The unit is pretty expensive: $600. Sure I recognize that it’s a premium product and competes with the iPad/iPad2 which aren’t exactly known for their affordability, but I think the XOOM would have a much better time selling were to to price at $500.

The Terrible

• You will find this on every review of the XOOM: the volume control buttons are retarded. They require way too much pressure to trigger. In fact, to put this in perspective, you need two hands to change the volume (or you need to press down really hard with your thumb… either way you look at it, this is a huge design flaw). You need two hands because you have to press with such force that if you didn’t have the other hand stabilizing the XOOM, it would tip/slide.
• Not having the SD card (and for the American customers, the 4G support) is a big no-no. They literally shipped an incomplete product. It’s a good thing this tablet was relatively open so I could readily flash a firmware with working SD card support, otherwise that would be retarded. Having 32GB of built-in is nice though.
• Proprietary power cable. I can understand that tablets require more power than USB can put out and I can understand the need for an external power cable – but  they should have gone for the laptop style connector rather than the oh-crap-the-pin-broke type.
• The lack of a PC dock. This is particularly bad as the Milestone/Droid had this functionality well over a year ago. Sure the XOOM has docks too (and the speaker dock is particularly awesome), but they don’t let you connect your phone to the computer with the dock --  and since the USB connector is on the side that jacks into the dock, you can’t dock (in order to charge) and connect to the computer at the same time!
• While on the topic of docks, the Speaker Dock for the XOOM uses a different (also proprietary) connector! At least the Standard Dock uses the same connector as the XOOM itself. The dock itself is a bit trickier to work with than the slam-it-in type that I am used to with the Milestone.

Bottom Line

If I were buying again, the final draw would go down to XOOM vs Galaxy Tab 10.1v (or maybe the Eee Transformer), I suspect the new Galaxy would win out from a hardware perspective – however, the lack of readily available accessories is a deal breaker for me. The Transformer, if there was a docking station available, would win out.

End of the day, I love this device, it needs a bit of tweaking (like any gadget really, unless you have thoroughly adopted the Apple mantra/doctrine of you-do-it-this-way-only) but when you’re done with it, it’s a hell of a platform.