So here it is: the Motorola Xoom is about to land on our shores. This is a review, but because this is about tablets you know that it must involve comparisons. The Xoom doesn't live alone; if it were the world's only "media tablet" (to use the phrase analysts are using to try to split this species off from all the other tablet devices out there), that would be one thing. However, it's not even close to being the first. So yes – I am going to compare it to the iPad. (Update: Harry Metcalfe, who owns a Xoom, provided some extra information, so I've updated some parts.)
And here's the one-line review: nope, not yet, Motorola/Google. The iPad still has it, by some distance. Honeycomb is nice, and the Android things that are better than iOS are still better (cough *notifications* cough), but tablets are harder than smartphones. Also, app stores really matter, and the Android Market isn't nearly there.
If you compare like-for-like storage (the Xoom starts at 32GB) then the Xoom is exactly the same price as the same-storage iPad 2 at £479 from PC World (though at Amazon it's a whopping £570 or £660 for the 3G version).
So, finally, we have an Android tablet that's the same price as Apple's and even slightly bigger in screen. Kudos to Motorola.
First impressions
In person, the Xoom has an impressively large screen: like an angler with a fish, you feel you need to spread your hands really wide to hold it. In fact, the screen is only just wider, and very slightly thinner than the iPad's; yet the overall effect of the 16:9 aspect ratio (compared to the iPad's 4:3) is that you're holding something that's designed in Cinemascope. This turns out not to work in its favour, but we'll come to that.
The shape is slightly thicker in the centre than the edges, so the edges are raised from a flat surface – good for picking up quickly.
There's not a huge weight difference compared to the iPad 2, though it looks about twice as thick when put on a surface.
Unlock & power up
Turning it on is just a matter of … where's the button? For reasons best known to themselves, the Xoom's designers have hidden the power button on the back, on the top left, recessed into the chassis. (Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC had the same perplexed reaction.) If you need a laugh, hand one to someone who's never held one, and see how long it takes them to find it. One minute is good going, by which time they will have prodded the USB output socket, HDMI output socket, and power input socket, and volume buttons (all of which, sensibly enough, are on the side of the device).
OK, power on. And now we have Honeycomb – Google's 3.0 version of Android. It has clearly been almost completely rethought for a tablet (though there are a couple of leftover references to "phone" in the system: rather than the PIN or "draw a pattern" screen of an Android phone, you get a padlock sitting in a circle; you have to drag the padlock to the edge. (Neat, though it puzzled some people I tried it on: they pressed the padlock, they pressed the circle, they didn't find the "pull the padlock to the edge" idea self-evident.)
Update: Metcalfe points out that you can change this to a pattern, or PIN if you prefer, in the "Security" setting. The default "unlock" on an Android phone, of course, is a padlock that you "pull" across the bottom of the screen.
Home screen: arm the photon torpedoes!
The whole typography and look of Honeycomb seems to come from someone whose favourite film was JJ Abrams' version of Star Trek, with lens flare (those haloes around any light) galore and typefaces that are all wonderfully flat curves.
The default home screen on the Xoom is a deep blue background. As on the Android smartphones, there are five home screens; Honeycomb, though, arranges them in a carousel – you start in the centre, with two empty ones either side to which you can add apps when you swing them around, or use the button in the top right menu.
And also in the top right menu, there's a button with "apps", which takes you down one level into an "apps folder". How does that make sense? Why is Honeycomb giving us a pit into which apps are dumped, while also presenting you with four completely empty screens? It's not as if there are too many apps: the default installation has 24 buried in that folder, while each of the five screens can take at least 48 apps.
This is bad user interface design which reduces the chance of people using apps – and hence the tablet. Forcing the user to head down into a folder and then make apps return to the surface to use them means you're less likely to find them. Some people (because remember, some people who use computers and tablets are not that savvy) won't notice the "Apps" tag in the top right for quite some time. The most powerful setting on any computer is "default": it's what most people use most of the time. Google isn't doing itself any favours with the Honeycomb defaults.
Battery life: sufficient (with asterisks)
Much is made of the iPad's long battery life. That's because a tablet where you had to keep charging it as much as a laptop (typically an hour or two) would get very wearying. Their utility comes from the fact that you can pick them up and not have to worry whether you charged them this morning if you use them, say, an hour or two each day.
The Xoom does well – it achieved as much as the iPad. Ten hours, more or less – although note that Flash will halve that. You think you don't spend all your time watching Flash? If you open a lot of commercial web pages with adverts or (of course) watch YouTube, you're hitting Flash. More on this later.
Flash aside, the battery life is longer than a typical working day. You can tweak the life by changing how quickly the screen turns off, dimming the screen, turning off Wi-Fi, and so on.
Note though that setting the screen's off delay will mean turning it on a lot – and reaching around for that power button quickly gets tedious. In fact, that back-mounted button is my major criticism of the Xoom itself; yes, it falls under the left index finger if you pick the device up in the correct orientation, but you won't always. And if it's lying down and turns off, picking it up is a pain. Contrast having a button on the front and/or side (both, with the iPad): much easier to activate.
Email and Calendars: lookalike, work-unalike
If Apple were the sort of company that was keen on litigation over look and feel of interfaces, it would be after Google right now over the mail app: it looks almost exactly like the iPad's, but with slightly less panache. There's a left column of incoming emails, and the body of the selected email taking up exactly the same proportion of the screen as on the iPad app.
Honeycomb also doesn't bring a unified mailbox. (Update: it does, see below.) If you have multiple accounts and want to murder your email quickly, tough luck. You still have to pick from separate accounts. Odd that HTC, for example, can figure this out in the Sense UI that it puts on its Android phones, but Google itself can't. Or is it leaving a gap so franchisees can differentiate themselves?
That said, the mail program is workmanlike. There's nothing dramatically clever; it's functional. The Honeycomb calendar is good – the layout is clearer than Apple's.
Update: Metcalfe points out that you can get a unified mailbox view; you just use the Mail app. I overlooked this because the Gmail app (I use Google Mail, yup) was front and foremost in the home screen, and doesn't offer a unified view. I can't now recall if the Mail app is on the home screen or buried in the Apps folder or off on an adjacent home screen. Either way, it is confusing to have two different apps performing the same function.
Browser
Honeycomb gives you Chrome, with tabbed browsing. That makes it slightly faster to move between tabs (you can finger-scroll them along) than using the iPad metaphor, where you have to hit a button and then choose from the open pages or create a new one; the Xoom/Honeycomb also gives you up to 16 tabs (the iPad, nine).
A slight annoyance is that most sites will still recognise the browser as a mobile one – despite the screen being as big as some laptops'. You'll get served the mobile site, which in many cases isn't going to be the right experience for a tablet. No doubt in time sites will update their browser recognition. Here's hoping.
Is this a phone?
Despite all the work, Honeycomb still betrays its heritage. Some of the settings refer to "phone" settings, as does the YouTube Market app (which you'd think might be Honeycomb-aware). Is that a big thing? No. Is it a detail thing? Yes – it indicates that Google's Android team haven't quite worked out how they're presenting Honeycomb.
Flash. Gordon. Bennett.
Out of the box, the Xoom that I tested didn't come with Flash preinstalled. Browsing pages that had Flash content in this pre-lapsarian state brought empty white spaces. But the Market did alert me that there was a beta version of Flash Player 10.2, which I dutifully installed and forgot about.
Then I tried testing the Xoom against some Flash content – specifically, the Guardian's video page.
First of all, I didn't have the experience of stuttering Flash playback that some sites have reported: it played smoothly for me.
But ayayayay, watch the battery life. Every three minutes's play saw a 1% drop in the battery. Do the maths, and that suggests you'll get five hours of life if you're playing Flash all the time. And if you're doing a lot of web browsing on sites that use Flash, whether for adverts (as lots do) or for some display element (again, a surprising number do; try disabling the Flash plugin in your browser to see how much of the desktop web is Flash) then you're going to be hammering your battery in just that way. You're not going to get the enjoyable 10-hour life that makes a new tablet ("media tablet" in the analyst parlance) useful. One element makes them special, in my experience, is that you don't have to worry about the battery life, which means you don't worry about just carrying them around. Add Flash into the equation, and you subtract from that.
Complain about Apple and its refusal to include Flash all you like (and it seems some people enjoy doing so) but the reality is that its focus is on giving people the best possible user experience it can. And where different aims are incompatible – say, between having the longest possible battery life, or playing every single page including adverts on the web – there's an internal debate, which then results in what Apple thinks is optimal.
Again, you may disagree on what's optimal. In which case, here's your five-hour tablet from Motorola; and there's the 10-hour iPad. Of course, YouTube and Vimeo and BBC's iPlayer all offer HTML5-compatible versions of their video, which makes up a big chunk of UK video streaming. But again, Flash is here for you if you want it.
Consider yourself notified
Android's notification system on smartphones runs rings around that on Apple's iOS: it's more finely-grained, and a lot less intrusive, as I've previously pointed out in reviewing the Nexus S.
On Honeycomb, the notifications have moved from the top left (on phones) to the bottom right of the screen (or if you're holding the Xoom in portrait mode, along the bottom of the screen). This isn't actually an improvement, and I can't work out why the Android team did it. To make Honeycomb look different? OK, but in user interface terms it doesn't help. Your hands may obscure new notifications.
Even worse, it's quite easy while typing to hit a notification with a stray thumb and throw yourself off into the notifying program – a wormhole journey that's prone to cause a dramatic "Huh?" (or worse) moment. It's not good, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it – which is worse. Love the notifications, hate the positioning.
Any USB port in a storm
I've long ago complained about the number of different USB connectors that you find on devices. There's the "nearly square" (mostly found on printers), the "loaf of bread" (lots of smartphones), the "squashed bungalow" (some newer smartphones such as the Nexus S), Apple's 30-pin connector, and what seems like many more. To which you can now add the Motorola USB connector, which is none of the above.
Why, Motorola, why? The loaf of bread or squashed bungalow wouldn't have taken up any noticeable space on the externals. And many of us have at least one of those leads hanging around at home or work already. But no, you had to go and give us yet another connector, which leads to long hunts for the one with exactly the right socket. And that's not even the power charging socket; that requires a completely separate adapter and lead. Did you notice, Motorola, how for years Apple has let you charge devices through the same port as you use to connect it to a computer? Please do that in future.
Update: OK, everyone and their kitten is saying that the connector is the micro-USB port. OK - if you have a phone or device with a micro-USB port, you've got a spare lead. Yes, the EC is going to (try to) make phone companies standardise on micro-USB (not sure how that's going to sit with Apple with its 30-pin connector). It's not non-standard. But it's not that common either if you haven't bought a phone in the past few months either. Suffice to say I've been accidentally collecting USB leads for years and very, very few of them are micro-USB.
How big is that keyboard in the window?
For me the answer to this question was always: too big, or too small. As a consequence of the Xoom's 16:9 proportions, its edges measure roughly 8.7in (22.1cm) by 4.9in (12.4cm). (Calculation: 10in screen, Pythagoras's theorem.) The iPad's are 8in (20.3 cm) and 6in (15.2cm).
When you start typing on the Xoom, you're faced with two choices. In landscape mode, each hand has to span the keys across about 11cm; compare that to the iPad, where each has to cover about 10cm. In portrait (vertical) mode, on the Xoom your hands cover 6cm; on the iPad, 7.5cm.
My experience was that on the Xoom, landscape was too wide, but portrait was too narrow. I couldn't type accurately and quickly on the narrow version - the keys were too close – but with the wide keyboard, it wasn't comfortable to hold and type. And resting it on a desk wasn't easy because of its curved back. (Motorola might want to think about covers and desk-rests as a priority add-on to help sales.) The iPad keyboard, on the other hand, had a Goldilocks feel: not too wide, not too narrow. I can type really quite quickly on an iPad, and that's not due to greater use – I got the Xoom exactly a week after beginning to try an iPad.
Update: Metcalfe says "I never really use it in portrait, but in landscape, I love it. I can type nearly as fast as on a normal computer. Perhaps just practice?" Might be, but it will depend a lot on the size of your hands. Mine aren't small, but I still found landscape too much.
Apps: unconvincing
Much is made of the app experience on Android and on iOS, and the comparative differences between the two. The Android app experience on what you might call "core" apps (for me, things like Twitter, or Facebook) isn't much different, as much as anything because the same companies tend to do them.
The differences between the platforms come into sharper relief when you wander off the beaten track. Then you discover that the iOS ecosystem (having had longer to grow) has filled up many gaps where Android is still lacking, or that the apps on Android are, frankly, limited. One of my interests is Go: on the iPad you can get an app that will show you thousands of problems, professional games with commentary, or computer play. (It's called SmartGo Kifu, since you ask.) Not cheap at £11.99, but incredibly powerful; it's the sort of app you could keep using for years and still derive benefit at any level. On Android, it isn't there; the best I could find was a free app which doesn't offer the problems or professional games, only the play-against capability, and that wasn't very satisfactory either.
Yes, this is an outlier in terms of interest, but it indicates what happens when you're trying to build an ecosystem but don't have enough financial or volume incentive – yet? – to bring in the broad sweep of developers. Sure, you can choose from a zillion free shoot-em-ups. But the world isn't likely to run short of those any time soon. It's the apps at the fringes that indicate how strong your ecosystem is. Honeycomb, and Android, aren't there at present. And I'd wager there's a risk that if Android tablets don't start to make a mark against the iPad, that problem will remain.
Music, sweet music
Honeycomb comes with its own much-improved music player, which offers you a scrolling parade of song cover artwork, or a simpler scrolling list. Fun. This doesn't quite solve the problem of how you get the music onto your Xoom: obviously you're going to have to plug it into your PC and synchronise the music.
Umm … how? There's no iTunes-like program on the PC to simplify the transfer. And with everyone have tens of gigabytes of legally-acquired music on their PCs, you're going to have to make some sort of choice if you don't want to fill your Xoom within minutes of buying it.
You can get DoubleTwist, which does have a PC/Mac incarnation as well, though it can't "see" iTunes's Smart Playlists (where you create playlists that will include any artist whose first name is "Justin", say). It can synchronise "static" playlists with iTunes effectively, and create playlists on the Xoom. But in that case, why have the Honeycomb music app? Plus DoubleTwist doesn't synchronise too well with the Honeycomb music player: when I transferred over some iTunes music, the music player saw it, but DoubleTwist didn't. (It does play AAC-encoded files from the iTunes Music Store.)
You can get Spotify, of course, or We7's Radio Plus, so you don't have to store the music on your machine. But again, this questions the point of the Honeycomb music app – unless it too is meant for a forthcoming Google Music service, as frequently hinted at, not least by Motorola's chief executive Sanjay Jha.
Video: bad, bad, bad
Know what media tablets should be good at? Playing media. Know what the Xoom is bad at? Playing video. Once you've laboriously transferred files over from your machine (you have to download drivers for Windows and Mac – that is so non-post-PC), you find that
• it will play MP4 files
• it won't play AVI files
• it won't play .VOB (decrypted DVD) files
• actually, it doesn't have a program to "play" videos at all.
It's this latter point which is the most bizarre. If you've got a device that's meant to be able to play media, then shouldn't it have an app whose purpose is to play media? Lots of forms of it?
True, the iPad won't play AVI files or .VOB files either, but it won't even transfer them in the first place. The Xoom will happily let you fill it to the brim with video files, and good luck then finding an app to play them. (VLC isn't available in the Android Market, and I tried a number which just looked at my video files – AVI and VOB – and shrugged their executable shoulders.)
The lack of any explicit app for playing videos (despite there being a folder called "Movies" and another called "Videos"), unlike the iPad where you can play videos directly in iTunes – always assuming it's a format you got onto the device - is odd.
Perhaps we're only meant to watch full-length Flash videos?
Overall: the verdict
The Xoom is a good container for Honeycomb: the device itself is pleasing to look at, not too heavy (though it is heavier than the iPad 2), and if you get rid of Flash has good battery life and a competitive price. Android's strengths (cloud synchronisation of apps across platforms such as your computer, smarthone and tablet) are to the fore, but so are its weaknesses – small user interface niggles, and particularly the dearth of apps in the broader Market.
Overall? If you're offered the experience of the iPad or the Xoom, there's no price difference, and the iPad will do many of the cloud synchronisation things (addresses, calendars, email) as well as having iTunes if you want to synchronise music and apps. Which means this loses to the iPad.
All in favour
• Competitive price against iPad with same amount of storage;
• interesting typeface and general design for menus and elements;
• some neat user interaction elements;
• flexibility of Android for adding sub-elements (eg, turning wireless on/off) to main screens
All against
• 16:9 screen dimensions mean typing can be inconvenient either way up
• inclusion of Flash halves battery life
• too easy to hit notifications by accident while typing;
• low quality of apps in Market;
• nonstandard USB and power ports
• hard to add video, few formats supported
