Xoom and Honeycomb Quick Impressions

I just picked up the Xoom today and here are some quick impressions:

1) The new Android browser is nice (since it has tabs and loads very fast) but it is extremely buggy.  I can crash it easily..like 10 times within the hour.  Additionally zooming in and out is very quirky (it keeps randomly clicking on things and it taxes the tablet and slows it down to a crawl).  I had to manually force stop it or else the entire tablet will be hiccuping all over the place.  For now, I switched to the firefox browser.  I couldn't use the default chrome browser at all or for extended period of times.

2) It is painful that a different user-agent wasn't used for the android tablet since all browser pages default to mobile versions.

3) The interface in honeycomb is nice.  I love the visual adds from the all apps and the widgets page.  It makes it a lot easier to add things in bulk instead of having to keep jumping back to add more.  I also like the quick app launcher although it's limiting that it's only the last 5 recent items.

4) I like the transition from hardware to software buttons but the bottom system bar along the bottom does waste screen real-estate especially for apps that do not require them.  They only dim out but can not be replaced.

5) Speed-wise, everything in android is definitely snappier but with the increase in hardware spec and GPU acceleration, I still expected a bit more smoothness.  It's still not as quite as smooth as an ipad for instance even though that runs on much crappier hardware.  With increase multi-tasking, you do see more slowdowns but it's definitely not bad at all.

6) Hardware-wise, the xoom is naturally positioned to be used in landscape mode.  It's designed to be long and thin so landscape is definitely a much better fit which is fine.  The only problem is a number of apps like the fb app for instance do not even support that mode.

I do like the Xoom a lot (even though I may sound more negative than positive), and I think it will compete quite well in the tablet space.  The overall interface of Honeycomb beats iOS in terms of tablet usage for sure.  I certainly do hope that an update will come soon that will address the stability and crashes.

February 25, 2011   Posted in: Uncategorized

3 Responses

  1. pro00 - March 26, 2011

    thanks… This is usefullll for me.

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  3. Insurance Coverage - November 17, 2011

    thanks guys,,, i think honeycomb is the best,,,

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