Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here the four of you for you of the Android tablet that's kicking off the honeycomb craze this is of course a motorola xoom the first tablet to run androids three-point o operating system let's go ahead and dig in see if it lives up to the hype being a slight device how you interact with the tablet and how you get your information is going to be a paramount importance so that's where we're going to begin with the navigation and you why there are lot of differences here with previous versions of Android the first and most notable is the presence of a soft home button we don't have any physical buttons here on the outside of the screen so you don't have your capacitive home menu back and search button or sometimes physical buttons in the case of some devices it's completely soft here and it's always going to be present in the bottom left-hand corner no matter what orientation you have your device always going to be there no matter what application you are in so there's a bit of a learning curve and it took a little while to get used to about two days of using the zoom as my dedicated tablet i became used to it very quickly in fact i tended to prefer it I always knew orders going to be located if I had the device turn to the left I knew it was always going to be there in the bottom left hand corner it was oriented to the right it wouldn't matter it was always there something that I really tended to enjoy one of the things that I thought was going to annoy me about the zoom I really tended to go against what I initially expected next you've got a very nice and intuitive notification system down here below similar to what you might see if you've ever used growl notifications they pop up in a very unobtrusive manner and they don't stop what you're doing you can see right there about an email calendar you can have a ton of other choices you can pull up setting this very quickly by tapping the clock and they'll show you all your notifications you cap the home screen to get rid of them you've got what I'm referring to as smart widgets you can interact with these widgets in a lot of new manners that you couldn't necessarily easily do with older versions of Android so for example I've got to CNN application right here I can go ahead and scroll through different articles find what I want click it and it will launch the browser emails here you can see the same thing calendar and some web choices now how you're going to access these widgets might be very familiar if you used android go ahead and tap anywhere the five home screens here and you've now got four choices for choosing four choices for choosing of course you've got widgets app shortcuts wallpapers and more and in the more category you're going to see a ton of different choices here book smart contacts email account gmail label and a few other options if you want to go back you've got another soft button down there which is going to be a left arrow let's go ahead and select home the next thing that I want to mention is a button that lives right to the right of that home button looks like two rectangles that you're multitasking which is done in a very new and I think pretty intuitive way here with Android 3.2 go ahead and select it it's going to pull up what your most recently doing so if i wanted to jump into my browser i can go ahead and do that very easily i wanted to go back into settings where i was earlier go ahead and do that nice and easily no the multitasking here really has done very nice eloquently if you can say that in a very easy to understand smash fashion overall using the UI in the navigation there definitely was a learning curve if you've ever used an android device you're gonna have to remember how to do different things you could have to try and forget what you used to do on previous versions of android overall it took me about three to four days to really get a hang of the nuances of the device and learn how to use it all right so next let's talk about performance this thing is really packing a powerhouse of a processor packing powerhouse processor with the nvidia tegra 2 dual-core chip this thing should be very very fast and I found it wasn't as blistering fast as I expected it to be launching application for example could be very slow and that may be due to a very severe lack of dedicated tablet applications in the Android Market which we'll talk about in just a minute I experienced several crashes while browsing the web and I think it comes from a lack of optimization for the dual core hardware now while android 3.0 honeycomb is supposed to be optimized it is the first version of the operating system I do suspect that future Android updates will alleviate a lot of these concerns but if we're looking for a blistering fast tablet performance you're not going to get that on the zoom it is certainly for everyday usage and it is relatively zippy while doing tasks everyday tasks such as multitasking but if you're expecting a huge huge huge speeds improvements over what you've seen on your snapdragon android phone or on an ipad by comparison you're not going to be overly impressed with the performance again i do the next one improve with subsequent software updates next let's talk about the screen it's got a 10.1 inch diagonal capacitive display and the resolution of 1280 x 800 should be vivid but images do tend to look a little bit washed out let me go ahead and use the multitasking here and we'll jump it to the gallery you look at an image that I took for example using the rear facing 5 megapixel camera it's just not overly sharp and crisp and clear the screen does tend to look a little bit washed out and referencing back to my performance you can see what i'm referring to when i say it's not blistering fast the pinch to zoom here there's a little bit of a delay i've used android devices previous versions of android devices with much lower processors that have actually been a bit more responsive but going back to the images here and the screen it doesn't pop as you would expect a screen of this higher resolution there certainly visible and they're easy to look at but it's not as white bright and vibrant as I would have expected alright so next let's jump in and talk about the browser I will say this is probably one of the best uses of tab browsing certainly there are third-party tab browsers on a competitor like the iPad but the native safari browsers doesn't support it and it doesn't work as well I love the layout here of the browser you could load tabs in the background the pinch to zoom can be a little bit laggy let me go ahead and jump into technobuffalo here and you can see what the keyboard looks like on the keyboard here is extremely easy to use very easy to type on and the autocorrect as sort of typical Android is excellent so I'll go ahead and load it up here and we'll take a look at the browsing and this sort of reference back to the performance it's a little bit slow it's not as fluid as I would expect from a modern tablet very usable though and I think that I was getting a bit excited with the properties of what Tegra 2 could do and perhaps is a little bit of managing expectations now certainly it's not going to be a hard internet experience you're not going to be waiting for pages load assuming you're on used internet connection but you're just not going to get blistering fast performance so go ahead and see what the scrolling looks like there go ahead and stop and of course you can do your multi-touch pinch-to-zoom I will say though that I love the browser on this I think the tab browsing is absolutely outstanding flash is not yet on it so there might be a problem for some but adobe has that it'll be coming very soon that's more of an Adobe issue that a motorola or google thing all right so let's go ahead and jump home and let's talk about apps since apps are generally what a lot of us use on our mobile devices now unfortunately there are not that many dedicated applications here for the tablets I'm going to go ahead and show you what the redesigned android market looks like they did a fantastic job with the uoy of this I really looked very nice if I jump into featured tablet apps for example there just aren't that many right now now day by day more and more show up as developers get access to the AP is and they have time to develop so certainly this is a problem that will rectify itself very soon but there aren't that many applications right now that are meant for android 3.0 honeycomb so what that means is you're going to have to use legacy applications that were meant for you know the two dot whatever operating systems things like Twitter for example you're going to have to use an older application and I found that I had a problem using older applications with crashing oftentimes they weren't fully supportive if I wanted to use something on a regular basis like I used Bloomberg for example that would constantly crash while using an older application that's meant to run on android 2.0 as I mentioned earlier you're going to have another icon on the bottom there you see it right behind and sign the multitasking which is going to be your menu what you would get if you are using an older Android device so something to keep in mind that applications are really important to you right now you may want to wait to pick up Motorola Xoom however I assume it weeks and months as where people get to develop for the platform but that will be rectified and fixed next let's talk about build quality you're going to hold this guy in your hands quite a bit and i will say built quality feels outstanding definitely feels professional-grade the metal on the back the feeling of holding it on the side I just feels very good build quality really is outstanding and speaking of outstanding battery life is actually very impressive here as well if we use this on a very regular basis for emails as I do with the cellular data turned off on Wi-Fi you're gonna have no problem getting through two or three days i granted by day three you might be close to being powered out but you won't have much of a trouble battery life is really really nice one of the things that I don't like about it is it doesn't charge and fortunately via micro USB instead uses a proprietary port if I didn't like that have to carry around a separate power charger if I was traveling with the zoom cameras are pretty standard you've got a five megapixel shooter located on the back dual LED flash it actually has a pretty high resolution for front-facing camera here at two megapixel the interface freezing the camera is actually very nice and really included here on android 3.0 sort of done in that half circle fashion so you take some pictures go ahead and move around that have a ton of different options ranging from camera settings to scene modes and they're quite a few color effects white balance and then of course flash and you manage your zoom right from their camera quality was about average wouldn't expect from a 5 megapixel essentially a camera phone certainly it's already place your daily point and shoot camera but for getting pictures of your dog your cat or ever you might want to do this is really going to probably work out very nicely for you uh so the conclusion i think the zoom has tremendous potential and when i say the zoom i really mean android 3.0 as a whole i think it needs one or two software augmentations here to fix some of the lagging issues and take advantage of the wrong horse power that the tablet has i think that once we get the 4g LTE upgrade as well it's going to be screaming fast for the mobile users I love that it has DLNA support and I really would like there to be more application support from day one and that fault lies with google for not releasing the sdk until relatively close to android 3-pointers launch i'd say if i have to grade this on a one to five star scale i get some very solid three and a half but has potential for much more once we get more applications once we have to rely less on older apps that were meant for android 2.0 once we've got a software upgrade cuda takes more advantage of the multiple cores found in the Tegra 2 which most of the cow books are going to be running i think we're looking at an outstanding competitor for the ipad for HP's touchpad and whatever else may be coming on the market within that you rim playbook so if you are an android fan or you just want to give android tablet to try I do not think you're going to be disappointed with the motorola xoom and experience is only going to get better as more developers get their hands on it so I look to you what you guys have to say are you zoom fans are you not zoom fans you agree or disagree sound off down below i'm jon rettinger from technobuffalo and i'll see you in the next video bye bye you