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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."
As an owner of an android phone (Droid), I was keen on buying an android based tablet but eventually bit the bullet and purchased an iPad for $350 (refurb from apple) as I was sure that I wouldn't find a good android tablet at that price point anytime soon. As much as I've wanted to like the iPad (and I do like a lot of things including the amazing IPS LCD screen), I was amazed to learn that Apple has chosen not to have a native filesystem on its products. Making things worse - each App runs in its own sandbox with no ability to access files in another apps filesystem.
This has been a massive disappointment for me. I primarily bought the iPad for reading and organizing a lot of academic publications and texts, so that I could always have my library of papers and textbooks available to me. Right now, I have all my PDFs imported into iAnnotate (a PDF reading/editing app), but none of the other PDF reading/editing apps such as GoodReader or Papers (similar to Mendeley) can access these PDFs. I can only "open" a file from within iAnnotate in another app, but this is fundamentally useless as it doesn't even share the same physical file, but instead, creates a copy that is moved into the other apps sandbox. Any changes made to the file in the other app, do not reflect back in the original copy in iAnnotate.
This alone has rendered the iPad pretty useless to me. Using Dropbox to sync files in different apps helps to some extent, but is still really stupid because a) I am unnecessarily using bandwidth I shouldn't need to use just to share the same file library between different apps & b) I now have 2 complete duplicates of my library stored locally on my ipad for the 2 apps I am using.
This is a complete mess and I can't begin to understand why universities and schools would spend tons of money buying iPads for kids when it can't even handle having a common filesystem - allowing different apps to access their documents. All the other Apple decisions I can understand (closed system, etc), but not having a filesystem? How are you even supposed to consider it for serious use without one? I don't give a fuck if it is dual core or quad core. If I can't even share files across different applications on my iPad, it has very little value to me.
Considering that Apple hasn't attempted to remedy the situation so far, I have very little hope that things will improve. I guess I'll just wait another year or so for Android to get a bit more polished and then buy an Android tablet. I find it funny that Steve Jobs kept reiterating that the iPad2 isn't a "toy", and yet, it seems most suited to run single apps at a time without any ability to share your documents and files amongst applications on the iPad2.