Xoom - who has one

[Creampuff]

I never really put it down. I highly recommend it.

If you have handled the ipad or ipad2, what would you say or the pro/con's of the xoom.

Do you feel like a beta tester, and Motorola pushed it to market too soon? Or are the little bugs, pretty easily fixed with each update?

[UltraLNW]

I don't particularly like apple products, but I have spent some time with an ipad2. It is tough to compare the two and remain fair, but the most unbiased comparison I can make is that the ipad2 is more of a leisure device whereas the xoom is a more business-ish device.

I do feel like a beta tester, but that's OK as I knew that the early adopters would be exposed to early software issues. I'm relatively geeky and love farting around with this kind of stuff so experiencing these issues is something I actually enjoy (assuming the vendor is working to smoothen out the wrinkles).

Dunno that it was pushed too soon, because these issues wouldn't have shown p without a large enough sample of testers. I'm an android apologist though, so I'm not the best person to get a solid answer from. But long story short - I don't think I will stop using this any time in the forseeable future.

[trant6]

I'm on the fence too now that the wifi version is available for preorder. Once major complaint I see a lot is that there aren't enough apps availabe. Do you find this to be true?

[TonyM]

If you have handled the ipad or ipad2, what would you say or the pro/con's of the xoom.

Do you feel like a beta tester, and Motorola pushed it to market too soon? Or are the little bugs, pretty easily fixed with each update?

I shouldn't comment on the iPads, I despise iTunes and refuse to use it anymore.

The problems that exist today are pretty much not showstopper issues. When you're working with four large companies and the release date gets pulled in, some things have to get deferred to an update. The SD Card and LTE modem being the key items that werebumped. As a work around, they provided a 3G modem and mapped the internal memory to mount at /sdcard. You still have 32GB of storage and the system sees it as /sdcard to keep application compatibility.

Both of these limitations will be fixed soon.

I'm on the fence too now that the wifi version is available for preorder. Once major complaint I see a lot is that there aren't enough apps availabe. Do you find this to be true?

I've yet to have a feeling that there aren't "enough apps". Honestly, on my phones and tablets when I look for apps, I'm usually hit with multiple choices. So much so that I've yet to decide what I want to develop and have yet to start putting my Android Developer account to use.

The argument of "enough apps" usually stems from people counting the apps in the Apple store and comparing them to the Android Market. The problem is (from my experience browsing apps for my iPod Touch) that the Apple Store is flooded with a lot of crap apps and many duplicates. I'm sure the Android Market will get that way eventually as well, once it has had the time to grow that the Apple Store has had, and if the Android community becomes like Apple's and has users that will pay good money for any app. Seriously, some of the apps I've seen friends and extended family purchase boggles my mind. As a developer, (Apple hatred aside) why wouldn't you develop multiple simple apps in a short time and sell them on the Apple Market for $1 or $2 ? There's no return policy on the Apple Store so it's easy money.

I think if you're talking about tablet specific applications, then yes... the list is short (48 apps as of yesterday I believe), but almost every app I've tried that was developed as a phone app works. I've only had a couple major apps that didn't work on launch day.

As app developers update, this will all go away. The 3.0 SDK was only out for about a week before the Xoom launched, so many if not most of the developers may have never even recompiled the apps targeting 3.0 to test them in the emulator. I have 300 unique apps on my devices and in the last 2 weeks almost all have had updates and of the ones I bothered to look at the changelists for, I've seem many that claimed they were ironing out small issues with tablets.

My biggest issue was a music player I purchased because the one in 2.2 kinda sucked. Well, on 3.0 it didn't work and even broke the stock music player. Not a big deal because the player in 3.0 is better than the one I purchased.

3.01 runs good and Flash 10.2 is running well with more improvements to performance upcoming.

[Creampuff]

Bought the xoom (wifi only) and will now be getting ready to return it. There are some people who are getting intermittent or no wifi connections on their xooms. Motorola's response so far is to reset the router, but that's kind of hard to do when I am using a public access router that belongs to someone else. Public wifi signals that my phone and my laptop can access with no problems at all.

What ashame - I was hoping to avoid the Big Brother Ipad market - maybe I might wait to see how the ASUS Eee is going to be.

[copenhagen269]

I picked up one from Verizon a couple of weeks ago, I am happy with it but I also didn't have huge expectations for it. I am still optimistic that the bugs will get worked out at some point in the future.