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Have you actually used the Xoom at all?

langis.elbasunu

langis.elbasunu

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 19, 2007
115
14
Chicago
I tried it out the other day and was rather underwhelmed. Here are a few things I noticed:

1. highly convoluted interfacing
2. lag while scrolling
3. much better camera than ipad2
4. resolution variance makes no difference and in fact, ipad 2 has a better screen.
5. Its a bit louder than ipad 2 which is nice.
6. LED flash is good as well.
7. Android Market is pathetic
8. very buggy and jittery scrolling on xoom
9. widgets are kinda neat i guess but totally unnecessary for the most part.
10. its a bulky device and doesnt feel great in your hands
11. more customizable options (may or may not be a good thing)
12. the device and OS itself seem very sterile


Overall, its not a terrible product but really needs a ton of work. Where it excels is the rear facing camera w/ flash and volume of stereo speakers even though I dont believe stereo was necessary. Its also nice to be able to just dump files on there as you wish without something like itunes.
 
I purchased mine at 10am and returned it 24 hours later. It has got some growing up to do.
 
Bought mine a little over a week ago. Thought it was really slick, but as the days kept coming I became less and less enthused with it. Kept running into situations where it just wasn't able to do what I needed to do. A few points
  • The one widget I was interested in loading on it didn't even work.
  • The Facebook app crashes constantly.
  • There is no stock video player on the device. Seriously? This is a multimedia consumption device and you don't ship it with a damn video player? I had to download a 3rd party one from the marketplace that was ad supported.
  • It is a lot heavier than I first thought it was, over time you can really feel it.
  • They talked about how the tablet uses flash, but it still isn't available on it (I think it is supposed to get flash today or tomorrow).
  • The SD card slot doesn't work yet either. Don't know when it is supposed to work
It's being returned today. I know the last two points will be corrected over time, but for something they are trying to use as selling points, I think it is pretty lame that those options aren't even available to someone purchasing when I did. I came to realize that there isn't much advantage to the Xoom over the iPad, and now I am going to wait for an iPad 2 to become available and fulfill my tablet needs.

Oh well, I tried.
 
I know the Me, Me, Me, Me threads are all the rage but did we need another thread to bash the Xoom?
 
rdowns said:
I know the Me, Me, Me, Me threads are all the rage but did we need another thread to bash the Xoom?
Click to expand...

hey, i figured it was getting a ton of hate from a lot of people who have never even picked it up so I wanted to test it a give it an objective review. It wasnt all bad either.
 
The lack of Widgets is the biggest problem I see in iOS.

The second is the need to use the home key so damn much
 
I can't find it at best buy to play with :(

Been to 2 of them and can't find it a display unit anywhere.
 
I like the hardware.

Software just feels generally unpolished. Like desktop Linux distributions; everything is kinda thrown together and the GUI is badly inconsistent. (Desktop Linux is very powerful, but I don't think anyone will argue that the GUI is inconsistent and doesn't feel designed)
 
I played with my friend's Xoom over the weekend. My friend ended up returning it on Monday.

Xoom is ok. It feels like a test product. Like Google and Motorola designed this product just to launch a tablet competitor to the iPad. Sorta of like HTC G1 (yes I was one of those original G1 users).

As others have stated it doesn't fee like a "finished" product like the G1. Limited Android market.

Android tablets will improve with version 2 or 3 likes Android phones. But I'd wouldn't even want a Xoom if someone were to give it to me for me.
 
I only played with one briefly. Let's hope someone produces a decent device based on Android. Apple needs competition.
 
I used it for a little, way overhyped.

The scrolling wasn't smooth and Android still feels like a beta operating system. The GUI was pretty confusing, in my opinion, but I am used to iOS.
 
langis.elbasunu said:
I tried it out the other day and was rather underwhelmed. Here are a few things I noticed:

1. highly convoluted interfacing
2. lag while scrolling
3. much better camera than ipad2
4. resolution variance makes no difference and in fact, ipad 2 has a better screen.
5. Its a bit louder than ipad 2 which is nice.
6. LED flash is good as well.
7. Android Market is pathetic
8. very buggy and jittery scrolling on xoom
9. widgets are kinda neat i guess but totally unnecessary for the most part.
10. its a bulky device and doesnt feel great in your hands
11. more customizable options (may or may not be a good thing)
12. the device and OS itself seem very sterile


Overall, its not a terrible product but really needs a ton of work. Where it excels is the rear facing camera w/ flash and volume of stereo speakers even though I dont believe stereo was necessary. Its also nice to be able to just dump files on there as you wish without something like itunes.
Click to expand...

I still have one I picked up a week ago but it Is going back this weekend. I agree it needs some time to mature and plenty of room for a more polished UI. The lock ups and lag is not acceptable afte r using devices like an iPad.

Shivetya said:
The lack of Widgets is the biggest problem I see in iOS.

The second is the need to use the home key so damn much
Click to expand...

JB the iPad allows for widgets. It's possible, just not out of the box, then again plenty of people root their Android device to get around manufacturer lock outs as well.
 
omni said:
I can't find it at best buy to play with :(

Been to 2 of them and can't find it a display unit anywhere.
Click to expand...

I found the display Xoom at my local Best Buy (it was at the end of the counter with the Netbooks). Unfortunately, the demo unit wouldn't power on...

Oh well, at least I tried to play with it.
 
Had mine for 14 days.

I liked it, but it was buggy. Resolution was nice for PDFs, but the ips on the iPad looks much more vibrant.
 
KoukiFC3S said:
Had mine for 14 days.

I liked it, but it was buggy. Resolution was nice for PDFs, but the ips on the iPad looks much more vibrant.
Click to expand...

yeah for sure...i couldnt discern any noticeable resolution difference between the 2 but i thought the ipad 2 screen was much more vibrant
 
Apple is far from perfect, but they'll always have a leg up on the competition as long as they continue to control the entire user experience, from hardware to software to packaging, etc. The android products just have too many chefs in the kitchen: hardware, software, cell carrier. Because of all the negotiations, you spend more time making all the partner companies happy and less time focusing on the end user experience.
 
My boyfriend has it and I have played with it for a few times. He also installed flash on it. The flash is alpha version and live streams are kinda laggy but youtube and stuff like that works fine. It didn't have any noticeable impact on battery life either.

When I used it I didn't encounter any lagging or crashes. I thought it was fast and responsive.

If I could take the digital copies that come with my movies and put them on a Xoom, I would get that in a second...but I can't. I would like flash, but I want the media more. And whenever I come across a flash site I can just ask my boyfriend to borrow his xoom for a few minutes. lol.
 
dacreativeguy said:
Apple is far from perfect, but they'll always have a leg up on the competition as long as they continue to control the entire user experience, from hardware to software to packaging, etc. The android products just have too many chefs in the kitchen: hardware, software, cell carrier. Because of all the negotiations, you spend more time making all the partner companies happy and less time focusing on the end user experience.
Click to expand...

Well said!!!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)


John Gruber raised an interesting point about RIM's upcoming tablet. He felt that of the big 3 competing against the iPad, (RIM, Motarola, and HP) that RIM have the best chance, since a 7" tablet would be seen as more of an alternative to the iPad than a direct option.
 
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