Hands-on Face-off: IPad 2 V Motorola Xoom

GMGruman writes "Is the iPad 2 all that it's cracked up to be? Or does the first Honeycomb Android tablet, the Xoom, still hold up? I spent an intense weekend comparing the two tablets, detailing in this review how each performs in a battery of tests."

Comments

Extra Extra!

[WrongSizeGlass]

The Xoom has features that the iPad doesn't. The iPad's UI is smoother than the inaugural Android 3 (Honeycomb) release. We needed 7 pages to tell us that??

Re:Extra Extra!

[Americano]

No, we need 7 pages to generate enough ad impressions to pay someone's salary.

We only need one sentence to tell us that they both have significant numbers of common features, and each has a few strengths that the other doesn't.

Re:Extra Extra!

[znu]

Fortunately, you don't have to bother reading past the first page, because it contains a dead giveaway that the article is essentially just shallow filler content designed not to offend anyone.

The iPad, with 60,000 + tablet-optimied apps, scores a nine for application support, while the Xoom, with a handful of tablet-optimized apps, scores an 8? Seriously? And all the arbitrarily chosen criteria are equally weighted? Meaningless nonsense.

Re:Extra Extra!

[shmlco]

Are you into social networking? Photography? Cooking? Design? Reading? Watch movies? Like music? Do you fly a plane? Play golf? Go to school? Do construction? Are you an artist? Play in a band? An independent contractor? A consultant? A lawyer? A doctor? Work in IT?

I could go on and on and on, but even if one were to accept that no one would install more than 30 apps (I have about 100, and NOT all games), we'd still be faced with the fact that the 30 apps that YOU might want are completely and totally different than the 30 apps that I might want, and those still are different from the ones that a housewife, my son, and your daughter might want and need and use.

Take a calculator: simple, basic functionality, right? Well... do you want a paper tape of your results? Do you need a scientific calculator? A programmer's calculator that works in hex? A mortgage calculator? A graphing calculator for advanced mathematics? Do currency conversions? Want RPN? Need a photography calculator that can do DOF and hyperfocal calculations?

Sorry, but one size does NOT fit all.

So -- in fact -- the number of apps on a given platform is significant, because it dramatically increases the likelihood that a set of apps exist to suit your interests and suit your needs and suit your lifestyle.

It's the ecosystem, dummy!

[bennomatic]

Love Apple, hate them or something in between: nobody is going to beat the iPad, no matter how great a device they build, until they are able to build a competing "ecosystem" like Apple has done with the iTMS/AppStore. Nerds care about the specifications, but nerds aren't the target market anymore; everyone else is. And everyone else is more interested in what you can *do* with the damn thing.

Re:Only needed one page

[coinreturn]

My take of that paragraph was completely different. Here's the money quote:

"...but the number of tablet-specific apps in the Android Market has more than doubled in the past two weeks, from 16 to 37."

You must be f@cking joking me. There are over 65K tablet-specific apps in the Apple app store. And this just nudges the iPad one point over the Xoom? Pfft. Butt-kissing "deathmatch" refuses to piss off either manufacturer by intentionally splitting the final score by a measly 5% difference.

What?

[bluefoxlucid]

The Xoom tablet displays mail as black text on a white background (as does the iPad 2), not as white text on a black background in the manner of Android smartphones. Thus, the messages are much more readable.

Uh, my phone displays black text on white background; this of course makes text much less readable than white text on black background like most high-contrast settings for visually-impaired users provide.

Re:Only needed one page

[Samalie]

Oh come off it already.

There's fanboi-ism, there's anti-fanboi-ism, and then there's blatent bullshit. Guess what category your post falls under?

Tablet-specific apps are barely there for Android...today. Give it a few months, and there will be thousands there too. Apple has the numbers advantage today...and I would also argue they have a "usefulness" advantage today as well. Sure, there are a thousand different soundboard/fart apps and other such bullshit on the iOS app store...but there is a shitton of quality apps there too. TOmorrow...Apple may or may not retain the numbers advantage, but Android will catch up. BOTH are damn fine OS's, with iOS showing a bit more polish over Android 3.0 right now...but Android will close the gap without a doubt.

Being so blinded by hate either way is just fucking stupid, and quite frankly makes you look like a fucking shithead. Anybody who refuses to accept that Apple is the reigning tablet king (and tablet app king) is fucking deluding themselves. Anyone who thinks Android won't catch up is just as fucking delusional.

In the end...when we don't act like fucking children...we all win. Because BOTH companies will be forced to improve their devices and underlying OS's to stay competitive with each other. That is GOOD for all us consumers, period.

Re:Only needed one page

[jsdcnet]

No, Apple customers still lose. They still can't run Flash

I'm an Apple customer and I consider that a win.

Re:Here's the biggest stat: number of apps

[vijayiyer]

For an example, go look at http://www.foreflight.com/ipad (an app for pilots with moving map charts, weather, instrument approach procedures, etc).
Now think about how that would scale down to a phone simply by scaling the UI elements. Guess what - it doesn't.
It completely changes how I manage my workload in the cockpit, and if it had the same UI as their phone version, I wouldn't use it at all.