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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."
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??
http://www.infoworld.com/print/153837
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked
and their review helps as well http://www.anandtech.com/show/4215/apple-ipad-2-benchmarked-dualcore-cortex-a9-powervr-sgx-543mp2
The key items to take away from both are, yeah the cameras suck but this is truly a real upgrade from the iPad. Performance alone puts is ahead of the older model as well as many available tablets. They did find out that the dual core processor is actually running at only 900mhz. While the Xoom pushes more pixels because of its 1280x800 versus 1078x768 the iPad2 pulls far ahead of it, beyond what the pixel count would account for. As for gaming, some games are already taking advantage of the new power, Infinity Blade has been updated and looks fantastic. This brings up the issue, will there be apps sold that are marked iPad2 required?
Better yet, its cheaper than its nearest competition. The only question is, how long before really good Android tablets come along?
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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.
The CB App. What's your 20?
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.
Part of it is that the iPad 1 was the first tablet to come out with a successful formula. Since then, some manufacturers have been intelligent enough to implement the same successful formula.
The short summary of the secret: Scaling up an OS designed for touchscreen phones (iOS, Android) to tablet size (the approach first used by iPad 1 and used by other companies since then) works, scaling down a desktop OS (Windows) to a tablet (the usual approach prior to iPad 1) doesn't.
Microsoft still hasn't learned - they're still trying to stick Windows 7 into tablets. FAIL.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The xoom doesn't have flash either. Adobe hasn't approved it yet it might be available some time in April only 2-4 weeks behind the original schedule of mid march.
The xoom shipped with a nonfunctional SD card slot .
The big problem with android is there are to many hardware choices leading to huge gaps in functionality, which vastly screws up the available software.
any iphone app will work on an ipad, but not every android app will work on a honeycomb tablet.
I find this sucks. while I like the ipad as it is a lot smoother interface than android, I find it is to large for my personal tastes. So I have to wait for 12-18 months for some company to come out with a decent wifi only android tablet.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"...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.
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.
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Have you considered a Nook Color? It's cheap - 250 dollars and, if rooted, it is a fully functional Android tablet.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
I want to be able to decide for myself which software I run on my computer
Then buy an iPad and jailbreak it.
Stop pretending you don't have a choice when you do, just so that you can claim some rational reason for your choice beyond sheer hatred of Apple. If you want to not buy a product simply because you hate the company than admit that, and don't claim it's a technical issue when it's not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it makes that big of a difference in iOS, that just means iOS is broken.
Non-tablet apps run just fine without tweaks in nearly all situations on Android tablets. I haven't used a single tablet-optimized app on my Huawei S7 - they just properly handled the lcd.density variable and adjusted their rendering to take into account the difference.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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No, Apple customers still lose. They still can't run Flash
I'm an Apple customer and I consider that a win.
no longer working for cnet
This. A lot of iPad owners also own an Apple laptop and have first hand knowledge of how crappy flash is. Just the other day I was talking to a college who had installed Flashblock because flash cut his (Apple) laptop's battery time in half. You don't even need to go to a site that uses flash, just the flash ads are enough. At this point, personally, I wouldn't install flash on my iPad if Adobe paid me. If there are multitudes of Apple users clamoring for Flash on iOS devices I sure haven't met them.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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.