Damning the Xoom?

by Sir.Christopher Of Baltimore

Feature: Ars reviews the Motorola Xoom
[Via Ars Technica]

Motorola’s Xoom tablet is the first device to ship with Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a highly anticipated new version of Google’s mobile operating system. Honeycomb introduces a sophisticated new user interface that was designed for the tablet form factor—a major step forward for Android. Motorola has matched Google’s software with a compelling piece of hardware that delivers great performance and reasonable battery life.

Although the Xoom has a lot to offer, the product feels very incomplete. A surprising number of promised hardware and software features are not functional at launch and will have to be enabled in future updates. The Xoom’s quality is also diminished by some of the early technical issues and limitations that we encountered in Honeycomb. Google’s nascent tablet software has a ton of potential, but it also has some feature gaps and rough edges that reflect its lack of maturity.

In this review, we will take a close look at the Xoom hardware, the Honeycomb user experience, and the Android platform’s potential as a tablet operating system.

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These quotes made me wonder about anyone buying an iPad wannabe for $800? Not too impressive, with quirky and missing features. Feels like a 0.9 release.

Although the Xoom has a lot to offer, the product feels very incomplete. A surprising number of promised hardware and software features are not functional at launch and will have to be enabled in future updates. The Xoom’s quality is also diminished by some of the early technical issues and limitations that we encountered in Honeycomb. Google’s nascent tablet software has a ton of potential, but it also has some feature gaps and rough edges that reflect its lack of maturity.

Here are some of the hardware limitations:

Although the Xoom was designed to support Verizon’s new 4G LTE network, support for this network is not enabled out of the box. Consumers will have to ship the device back to Motorola to have it fitted with the necessary components. The 4G hardware upgrade will be available at no cost, but will take 6 business days to complete.

It’s not clear yet exactly when Xoom buyers will be able to send in their Xoom to receive the upgrade, but Verizon says that it will be available “shortly” after the product’s launch. Reports suggest that “shortly” means within the next 90 days.

LTE isn’t the only hardware feature that’s not working right out of the box. The Xoom’s microSD card slot is also non-functional, due to software issues that are attributed to Honeycomb. Motorola says that the feature will be fixed soon in an over-the-air update. The Xoom’s much-touted support for Adobe Flash is also absent at launch and will similarly be delivered in an upcoming software update.

So, to bring it up to its full potential, you’ll have to send it back and wait for over a week to get it back. And Flash support, a big selling point, will be available sometime.

They ship a 0.9 product and hope people will wait for the 1.0 version.

More suport for a 0.9 version:

Although the Xoom performs well, its reliability leaves a lot to be desired. During a week of very heavy use, I had between 5 and 8 incidents of applications force-closing every day. The issue wasn’t isolated to third-party applications—Google’s own software crashed pretty regularly.

Hanging and force-quiting 5-8 times a day. What a handy device.

Some of the software has 0.9 issues:

Unfortunately, Motorola doesn’t bundle its own custom messaging application with the Xoom. Users will have to rely on Android’s own native e-mail client, which leaves a lot to be desired.

The conventional e-mail client in Honeycomb has a sophisticated new tablet-friendly user interface and a number of much-needed new features, but it still suffers from extremely poor protocol implementations and exhibits a number of long-standing bugs.

[...]

Motorola, HTC, and many other handset makers typically ship their own mail clients on Android phones so that users won’t have to suffer with the mediocrity of Google’s poor effort. Motorola’s mail client on the Droid X and Droid 2 is especially good and fills in a lot of the gaps, but it’s not available on the Xoom.

Their conclusion

The Xoom’s impressive hardware specifications and ambitious feature lineup are intriguing, but the product falls short of its full potential due to a general lack of completeness. It feels like it was rushed to market and delivered to consumers prematurely. The number of headline features that are simply absent at launch is emblematic of the device’s deficiencies.

There are several other idiosyncrasies of the tablet. Such as this:

It’s a bit less comfortable in portrait orientation. Due to the length, the way that the weight is distributed feels off when it’s held vertically. You can get a better balance if you hold it near the top rather than near the keyboard when you use it in portrait, but it’s still not great. The taper also makes it feel strange when held vertically.

The dimensions are excellent for video, but not particularly good for intensive reading. When I’m holding the Xoom in portrait orientation, I feel like only the top two-thirds of the screen are in clear focus for text readability and I have to re-angle it a bit when I start to get down to the bottom.

The relative awkwardness of using portrait mode on the Xoom isn’t a huge issue, because most of the Honeycomb software seems to favor landscape orientation. One issue that’s worth noting, however, is that a lot of the existing Android phone applications are designed to be used in portrait orientation. Until more third-party developers start making native Android tablet software, Xoom users will end up having to use portrait orientation more often than they might like.

So, it’s best used in one orientation but most of the apps prefer the other one. NIce. But then reading is not what it is best at, apparently:

If you are an Android enthusiast and regard e-book reading as an important feature in a tablet, you might be better off getting a Nook Color and modifying it to run additional software. I personally prefer the Nook Color over the Xoom for reading novels and working through my Google Reader feed.

Meanwhile for many apps, the iPad works well in both orientations, often altering its user interface depending on orientation. But then, Xoom does not have to worry about many tablet specific apps at the Marketplace:

The main landing page has a graphical featured application marquee at the top and shows a selection of top applications. It also provides convenient access to an assortment of applications that are designed specifically for tablets. Currently, there are only 16 applications in this section.

I’m sure they will have more than 16 eventually but this is a year after the uPad came out. It’d be nicer to have more at the launch. And yes, the Marketplace app only works in landscape orientation. The iPad App store reformats when the orientation is changed.

Having to rely on Google for the OS makes it a little hard for the hardware makers. They have to release with the OS that is available, not the one they would like:

In light of Google’s vocal enthusiasm for using the Web as an application platform, it’s a bit surprising that the company is so far behind Apple in supporting that vision on a mobile device. When I tested toolkits like JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch on the Xoom, the gaps in the Honeycomb browser’s rendering engine were painfully apparent. Animated transitions stuttered and certain visual elements were not rendered correctly.

 

Auto-Tune the iPad 2

Auto-Tune the iPad 2
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

Just for fun…

You can tell by the expletives deleted that this version of the iPad 2 unveiling (YouTube link) was not authorized by Apple (AAPL).

For more Auto-Tuned Steve Jobs — including the “please turn off your Wi-Fi base stations”  iPhone 4 demo — click here. For even more Auto-Tune fun, check out Auto-Tune the News.

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Here is the video. Catchy tune. Hope he likes it. Bill Gates did not have any auto-tuned songs.

Lazy journalism and the facts

How a BoingBoing science feature was mutated: the “telephone” game
[Via Boing Boing]

As somebody who does a fair amount of curating—collecting and commenting on cool stories from around the Internet—I’m very aware of how easy it is to accidentally mutate the news. Kind of paranoid about it, actually. Done well, this kind of curation can add new ideas to a discussion, or, at the very least, help readers find stories and learn about new ideas they might otherwise miss in the vast sea of information. Do it poorly, though, and curation quickly turns into a game of telephone. The story gets twisted. The point gets lost.

For example, a few weeks ago, BoingBoing guest blogger Lee Billings published an interview here with Greg Laughlin, an astronomer who’d worked out a formula that calculated the value of newly discovered planets. The point of Laughlin’s work isn’t so much about the cash money price of a planet. Rather, it’s meant as a guide. A way to help the press and the public get a better feel for whether or not we should get real worked up about a discovery. Calling a planet “potentially habitable” doesn’t tell the average person as much as, say, comparing the probable worth of Gliese 581c ($160) to that of our home planet (approx $5 quadrillion). Laughlin’s formula is meant as a way to provide context, and as a gauge that shows us the intrinsic value in exploratory scientific research.

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Trying to get people to understand “the intrinsic value in exploratory scientific research” was not nearly as much fun as misconstruing the article to completely lose sight of its original message.

Better to spread a ‘good’ story than to actually show the facts. This is something that often gets attributed only to blogs but we can see here that the MSM does similarly when it wants to.

The sad thing is that the media’s inability to get the facts rights resulted in hate mail to the original writer. Such is the Fourth Estate today. Or, more likely, how it has always been, with a very few exceptions.

Celebrities doing the right thing

Cyndi Lauper entertains fellow travelers stranded in airport [Via Boing Boing]

[Video Link], via Clayton Cubitt.

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The Google Translation of the Video link says:

After a night of chaos in this airport for delays and flight cancellations, Cindy Lauper took the reins and calm with people using the mic taken by passengers in advance.

Amazing to see how many people can respond to a song released almost 30 years ago. And her voice does not need to be autotuned at all.

Airlines should have this for every major delay – former celebrity that is on call to perform for the delayed passengers. It could help their reputation a lot.

Thanks to the Internet – outhouse design in Christchurch

Improvised toilets of earthquake-struck Christchurch

[Via Boing Boing]

Aeon sends us, “a website showcasing a selection of ingenious long drop toilet seating arrangements that have proliferated in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake and its disruption of the sewerage system.”

ShowUsYourLongDrop.co.nz

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Now many of us can have templates to fashion our own latrines in case of emergency.

Best title of the day

French Court Tosses Ridiculous Criminal Complaint By Israeli Against An American Over Book Review By A German
[Via Techdirt]

Last year, we wrote about a horrendous lawsuit brought by an Israeli author/law professor, Karin Calvo-Goller, who had written a book on The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. Another law professor, Thomas Weigand, in Germany, reviewed the book for Global Law Books, and didn’t think the book lived up to its potential. I’ve read plenty of book reviews, and while this one is negative, it’s hardly a scathing book review. Weigand just didn’t think the book was all that good. It happens. Move on.

But Calvo-Goller did not move on. She claimed that the review was libelous, and contacted the editor of the journal — an American named Joseph Weiler — who responded quite reasonably to Calvo-Goller, pointing out that the review wasn’t that bad and that he did not believe the review was libelous (and explained in detail why not), and then offered Calvo-Goller the right to write a response that he would publish as well. He also pointed out that her reputation would likely take a much larger hit from trying to suppress a negative book review, than from the review itself.

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I love it when abusers of the court system get their comeuppance. Funny to think a book review could get sued for libel but to shop around for the best country to sue in? Glad the defendant fought back.