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Android Honeycomb 1st Impressions

2011-02-25
what's up everyone John rende you're from TechnoBuffalo here I've had the Xoom tablet now for just about a day and I want to give you some overview and impressions about Android 3.0 honeycomb so let's go ahead and get started all right so this is not going to be a review of honeycomb mighty stretch the imagination I've only had the tablet for a day less than 24 hours which is certainly not enough time for a review but what I would like to give are some first impressions of the tablet itself and honeycomb in general so I think that there are two very unique and different target demographics they're gonna be considering the zoom and any other honeycomb tablet first I think it's those folks that are going to walk it to Best Buy walk into the Verizon store or whatever their local retailer is and ask for a tablet they may be sold on an Android tablet that may be looking at an iPad but it's definitely a demographic that people are going to look for the casual tablet users who have no affinity for Apple or Android just looking for something to use while they sit on the couch the other market I think this is going to be is the very Pro Android folks those that are very familiar with previous versions of Android operating system maybe play around the SDK here on honeycomb 300 or into the tweaking and the hacking or have a very strong feeling towards Apple all right the reality is that a lot of people that vote to go for an Android device a lot of time that's a vote against Apple and same thing goes the other way a lot of people that are looking to get Apple devices a vote against Android take those two demographics those that really have no affinity one way or another towards Apple or Android and they're looking for a good tablet and then those that feel very strongly and that are involved in Android community so let's start with the former of those communities those that are just looking to pick up a tablet in general and a honeycomb tablet what they're looking for well I will say that there's definitely a steep learning curve here with Android 3.0 it's a bit different than previous version of Android you see in the past the first difficulty thing I've had to and still am sort of struggling with is a no physical home button that's something that I've gotten used to on pretty much all of my device at least the tablet devices so we've got a soft home button now for someone that's familiar and using an iPad it's going to be a bit different however for the people that were talking about who maybe you've never picked up a tablet this probably won't be as big of learning curve and as a different feeling as it is for me the home button resides in the bottom left hand corner and the nice thing is it's always in the bottom left hand corner no matter what app you're in or whether orientation you have it in its gonna realign itself and always be in that bottom left-hand corner which does make things quite nice and so sort of keeping online that steep learning curve there are a lot of things that this tablet can do and this thing can do a ton but they're not overly and readily apparent but you look at something about the iPad which certainly this is going to be cross shopped with there's something to be said for its simplicity it's very easy to use to pick up and just do now while the zoom may do much more you definitely need to spend some more time with it to learn how to use those features so for example things like these notifications down here are very handy to learn know how to use you can see some messages and emails that I've got but you may not know how to work those right away app to the top and go ahead and click you go ahead and view apps and view more apps if you have and then hit the home button down at the bottom if you use the editor in the past you're certainly gonna know that you can serve hold and tap down and get access to all your wallpapers and widgets and that stuff but again it may be a bit confusing to sort of the lay user who's just trying to learn how to use a new tablet now I think that the learning curve here is probably going to be not relatively long about two days actually I gave the tablet to my wife to try yesterday when he first brought it home now she's an iPhone user and she was able to pick up the tablet and learn how to use it with a bit of difficulty but after about 10 minutes of playing with it she was starting to haul through it was just different than what she was used to so let's go ahead and sort of keep talking about some of the the other demographics those that are very used to Android so this is a different Android experience some things are fundamentally the same you hold down an icon you can move it and delete it although now the remove buttons in the upper right hand corner same way to act as widgets and wallpaper you go ahead and hold it down as I show it you can scroll through a ton of different choices and you can move along here through app shortcuts wallpapers and such to sort of continue what you know the marketplace has been redesigned here for tablet unfortunately there aren't that many tablet apps available presumably that will change go ahead and show you what's there Android apps for tablets there we go so it does take a little bit to load there aren't that many here I think we've got what you know 15 apps or so at least two right now but there are many more that will presumably will be coming so if you get if you are familiar with Android is gonna be a very familiar experience for you one of the things that I really do like though are the widgets that appear it's nice to go ahead and check my email I can see my calendar I can go ahead and access my bookmarks and there a ton of other widget choices that are here it's going take a look at some of them the one knock that I have on this is a lot of the applications actually don't work with Android 3.0 even though they are well it's pretty much supposed to if the developers haven't updated it to be compatible you may have some compatibility issues that's something that we'll see addressed certainly as Android 3.0 matures go ahead and move that icon down i'm stickler to make sure things are in order so in conclusion in my first impressions of honeycomb it's a very full-featured operating system it works very well but it's gonna take you a little bit longer to get used to it but not familiar with Android X our fluid Android there's nothing gonna be a little bit of a learning curve but not as steep I'm starting to really enjoy using the zoom on I think it could potentially be my tablet of choice so I'm gonna go ahead and continue to use it play around that now I'll give you guys some more features no reviews is I feel more comfortable with it and feel prepared to offer a review at a comparison so guys want to know what you think as a zoom for you not for you to be waiting for the iPad 2 waiting for another Android Honeycomb tablet coming out i'm john retinue from TechnoBuffalo i'll see in the next video but mine
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