Gadgetory

hey guys I'm Joe with pocketnow.com and this is a Motorola Xoom running Android 3.2 honeycomb we're gonna see what it looks like now and what it looks like running Ice Cream Sandwich version 4.0 let's go take a look all right so this is the Motorola Xoom it's the launch device the partner launch device for Android version 3 which is codenamed honeycomb this has been updated over-the-air still stock we're not running a custom ROM here and it's up to Android 3.2 point 1 it's still honeycomb if you missed out on our last video it was kind of an editorial about how honeycomb wasn't necessary evil you may want to pause this video and go and watch that one just to kind of get a feeling about what honeycomb is and was and why it's kind of gotten a bad name or a black guy there are some reasons why and well we explain it all in that video so this is what we've got let's go ahead and take a look now right here we've got our home screen in fact we've got lots of different home screens that we can choose from as you scroll back and forth you can kind of see a outline with a fade in of the apps coming from the next panel really kind of a cool effect if you want to move something you tap and drag and you can't see it all that well will come over here down by the moon and you can kind of see a plus sign down there there's a grid of pluses that shows up on the screen that lets you kind of line up and define where you're going to be placing these icons you also have resizable widgets so if we tap and hold on this we have these little grabbing points these little diamonds so we can come in here and resize this widget to to fit the space really kind of cool what they've done there and that's carried through to version 4.0 which is Ice Cream Sandwich and you've seen that on the Galaxy Nexus that we've shown you in other videos so kind of cool what you've got there this is also the first one that has done this where you've got an apps and a kind of a my apps type drawer they're not really widgets per se in this view in fact if we go back home if you want to drop a widget on the screen you still have to tap and hold and then you get you know your widgets absalom papers and more that you can do from here a little bit different than what we've come to see on Ice Cream Sandwich I like how you've got your screens up here and you can simply drag and drop from this area to that area to put things where you want to go but I like having the apps and widgets in the same drawer like we have an Ice Cream Sandwich so kind of interesting this like I've shown you in other videos has something called fragments and what's a fragment I'll show you here a little bit if you look over on this side this is a list and this is another content so if we want to add a new note over here we can add a new note in the list and see the content over there in the view if this were Gmail for example we would have our Gmail list right here all of our incoming emails and we would have the body of the selected email over there on a smartphone it's kind of this is one view you select what you want and then you have the other view in there so it's kind of separated out but from a development from a coding standpoint it's really the same thing it's the same logic you don't have to write the app twice to be able to do it this is also where we've got our picker our task manager if you will we wanted to get rid of this we can't if you notice an Ice Cream Sandwich we have kind of a swipe to dismiss well you don't have that in this one you've just got you know tap to switch into it so one of the cooling is about Ice Cream Sandwich that's really all I have to say about honeycomb it's it's honeycomb and it does what it does and that's about it you've got kind of notification bar over here and soft buttons down here back home and your multitask button these fade away effects so does this one kind of fades into just dots when you're in an app like Netflix for example Netflix is another good example of of those fragments there's a different view in the smartphone version Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich then there is in a honeycomb view or even an Ice Cream Sandwich view on a tablet just because the tablets got a bigger screen so there we go here's kind of your status indicator lots of cool stuff in there but it's been really laggy honeycomb does not have GPU acceleration for the the core launcher if you want to GPU accelerate your app like if you've got a game you can do that you just have to put a couple lines of code into your app to turn it on Ice Cream Sandwich it's turned on by default so that'll be really cool to see how their performance improves from this to the next one I'm gonna go ahead and run quadrant here if I can do that and I'll show you the score here shortly it's not optimized for tablets so it kind of kind of wonky how it moves all around and does that you can see my fingerprints really well on there but it's going through and running the test it hasn't scored really well in the past probably isn't going to do too good here so we'll see what it does on Ice Cream Sandwich as well okay so flashing Ice Cream Sandwich on to the zoom was really really easy what we're gonna do now is just unlock now you'll notice we've got the Ice Cream Sandwich style unlocker unfortunately we don't have face unlock like we have on the Galaxy Nexus if we come over here to security and take a look our screen lock we have none slide a pattern pin and password we don't have face on locket I don't know why but looking down here at the bottom we can see we've got the new Ice Cream Sandwich back home and multitask if we come into multitask we can see now we can easily dismiss these very fast very quick looking over here we've got the new icons the new Roboto font which honestly looks so much nicer than the font that we had on here before I really didn't acknowledge or respect just how much crisper and clearer that font looked when it was on the Galaxy Nexus but now that I see it on the zoom I'm really impressed so let's go ahead and take a look this is my screen now I didn't have to reset I didn't have to do anything I just flashed and it took quite a while probably not quite 10 minutes to do a full boot before I was able to get up and running which is not uncommon for a first boot after doing a full flash now it remembered all of my icon locations where everything was which is really really nice so I didn't have to do anything different now taking a look over here you'll see we've got the same behavior on the the resizable widgets so that's nice to have too but did you notice this when I was swiping here everything is just so smooth and fluid really quite impressive how fast that was let's go ahead and open up a calendar here in fact I'm gonna use my calendar icon there now this is also very smooth very fluid and it kind of shows you what I was referring to where we have the view and then a fragment over there for a list in this case the list is a date picker so we can come over here and look at my week addenda see how that is just flip through the weeks just really really fast month the same thing except this goes up so we can get through that quickly the agenda we can just fly through that really really quick so really cool I like it quite a bit contacts is new as well so here's my contacts I've got all of my groups over here my favorites over there just really fast the way that things work here's a lot smoother I mean you've just got to play with this - to see exactly what I'm talking about so let's go ahead and go into what we can do here just like with Ice Cream Sandwich on a smart phone long pressing on the desktop only lets you do wallpaper like stuff so here we can choose from the Galleria the live wallpapers a perfect viewer which is an app that I have installed and wallpapers in general so I like what I've got which is a live wallpaper this is beautiful weather by the way by the makers of beautiful widgets which is what these two widgets is same ad same developer but let's go ahead and take a look in here and see what we can do let's get over to a screen that has some space on it you'll notice now when we go into apps we have apps and we have widgets okay and notice how smooth this this is I mean I can just flip throw the pose as fast as I possibly can it's really nice it's really quick let's say we want to do some stuff with videos let's make a videos group so I'm gonna go ahead and grab the MX video player I'm gonna drop that right there I'm gonna go back and we're going to choose YouTube we'll drop that right there and make a folder or a group we'll do the videos app will do XD a TV just like that and we'll go ahead and add we'll go ahead and add Netflix into that as well so now we can open this up we can give it a name and just like with Ice Cream Sandwich we have these nice little tutorials that are they kind of get in your way if you know what you're doing but if this is the first time that you're using Ice Cream Sandwich it's kind of nice to show you what you can do so I'm gonna name this folder watching just like that and it's named there we go I can now position this wherever I want and I can get rid of this however I get rid of it I don't know how to get rid of it over here live on the screen but anyway you can see what we're talking about very quick very easy very smooth and fluid I'm really really impressed with the the way this is now I've never been able to get quadrant to run on the zoom I don't know why but I want you to see this and it's it blew my socks off the the boring part is up here at the front while it runs through this stuff but the part that I like is the planet so you know what I'm talking about where you've got the moon going in from the planet well it's really really slow on the zoom running honeycomb at least running honeycomb 3.2 which is why I had the most experience with on this device now over here if I can get this to run and like I said this this is not a tablet based benchmarking utility but sometimes you can get it to do more stuff than others but you'll notice just how smooth and fluid this is coming through here we're at about 20 frames per second 22 a little bit of a graphic anomaly and some missing stuff in there that's supposed to have rings that goes up and down this is what was really telling just smooth fluid crisp or getting above 40 frames per second over here this is very resource-intensive we're still getting about 30 frames per second on that just overall really really really nice and this time we got a result back benchmarking it just shy of 1700 points which isn't tremendous but you guys know as well as I do benchmarks aren't always telling of the true performance but overall I'm really impressed you know of course we've got our our menu button down here at the bottom as well this is what tablets are supposed to be an Ice Cream Sandwich runs every bit as good on tablets as it does on smartphones in fact I'd be willing to go out on the limb and say it runs even better on tablets than it does on smartphones really kind of neat showing off Ice Cream Sandwich running on the Motorola Xoom 4 pocket now I'm Joe Levi