Honeycomb: Motorola Xoom Review - www.drmobiles.co.nz, Tel: 09-5515344

This week “Motorola Xoom” hits the UK  market with amid awave of hype as one of the first Android tablets to run Honeycomb, the operating system designed specifically for the larger devices. But can it really challenge Apple’s iPad?

The Good

First things first: the Xoom is a really nice product. Really. It’s well made, in the traditional Motorola ‘I am big macho slab of technology you could probably bring down a charging bear with’ way. It’s quick and powerful, the dual core processor and 10 inch screen delivering a potent multimedia experience. If you’d dropped this into someone’s lap 16 months ago, it’d have blown their mind (and hurt their lap). Even just a few months back, before the iPad 2 was revealed, it was justifiably feted – winning ‘Best In Show’ at CES, and what have you.

And there’s a huge amount to enjoy about the software too. In plenty of ways, Honeycomb totally owns the iPad’s iOS – especially in the two areas where Apple’s software is in dire need of a makeover, notifications and multitasking. Notifications pop up unobtrusively in the lower right hand corner, letting you deal with them at your leisure, while you can switch between recently used apps with ease thanks to a simple button in the bottom left that brings up your last five opened apps. Quite simply, Apple needs to fix this in iOS 5 – because otherwise they’re in danger of getting left behind here.

And there’s plenty of other quality in Honeycomb too. The native Google apps – Gmail, Maps, YouTube and the like – are outstanding, while the pleasingly customisable interface, letting you position apps and widgets how you like, is very user friendly. The browser, an elegantly tabletised version of Chrome complete with tabbed browsing, wipes the floor with most other mobile device browsers. Oh, and it runs Flash – and it actually works. That’s right, no choppy, crashy nonsense here, just your actual proper, smooth, working Flash video on a mobile device. Beware low-flying pigs, people.

And while Steve Jobs’ snide comment that Honeycomb had fewer than a hundred apps designed for it (compared to tens of thousands for the iPad) may be technically true, it does rather miss the point – Android apps are already built to scale well between different screen sizes. As such, you won’t have a problem filling up your screens with perfectly functional, good-looking apps. The standard Android Angry Birds looks better at this size than it does on small screens; the official Twitter client and Tweetdeck work fine, expanding to fill the space (and fit in more tweets); the Kindle app offers a gorgeous full-screen reading experience. Even if some apps look a little weird at first, they still function perfectly well.

The Less Good

Sadly, while it’s excellent in so many ways, the software isn’t without its bugs. We don’t want to jump on the old ‘Android apps force close all the time’ bugbear (if you think iOS doesn’t force close apps for no apparent reason, you haven’t being paying attention – it just doesn’t give you an error message like Android does) but it’s more prevalent on Honeycomb than on any recent interation of the smartphone version.

And there’s a host of other weird glitches as apps try to get to grips with a slightly unfamiliar environment. The Spotify app seems to keep believing that it doesn’t have an internet connection, when it does. Trying to close open apps is inconsistent – shutting them down, either with the onboard app manager or a third party task killer, sometimes simply doesn’t work. Some apps inexplicably don’t scale up to the tablet size, staying as a little phone-sized box on the screen (Drop 7, looking at you.)

And while the distinction between Phone Android and Tablet Android apps is less distinct than in iOS world, it still would be nice if you could navigate the Android Market to seek out only apps that were designed for, or have been shown to work properly, on your device
Lots of these problems will, in all likelihood, be fixed before too long, as app developersupdate their apps and Google work on the next iteration of Honeycomb. But right now, despite its many impressive qualities, the whole experience feels more like a final beta release than a fully polished product.

The Bad

Put bluntly, the Xoom’s simply too heavy and too thick. We thought the iPad 1 was too heavy, frankly – you couldn’t hold it in one hand for any length of time without getting a severe case of wrist-ache. (We still maintain we were right about this, and the 15 million people who bought one were wrong.) And the Xoom is a bit heavier and thicker than even the iPad 1 was. Yes, it’s more portable than even the average netbook – but it doesn’t fulfill the promise of tablets, because you still need to rest it on a surface of some kind, or have metal arms or something. Even if you accept some buggy software – that’ll get fixed in a few months, right? – the Xoom’s ungainly heft seems like a deal-breaker when everyone knows that slimmer, lighter Honeycomb tablets are on the way over the coming months.

This post is sponsored by: Dr Mobiles Limited
1 Huron Street, Takapuna, North Shore 0622Tel: (09) 551-5344 and Mob: (021) 264-0000
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