I’ve been using the Motorola XOOM for just over a day now, and I thought I’d share my initial thoughts. Which coincides nicely with Telstra’s confirmation that this bad-boy is launching through them next month. First off, the XOOM is quite heavy as it weighs 730grams, which is 130grams more than its main rivals: the iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab 10.1v. The build quality is top-notch with no cheap plastic to be felt on the device. HDMI playback onto the TV is extremely nice, especially as the browser feels just like a full desktop browser so you can browse through the web on your TV as well as watch movies, listen to music and run apps. A little downside to the hardware is the use of a proprietary charging adapter instead of utilising the MicroUSB slot that is available.
I don’t want to give too much of the device away, as I’ll leave it for the review in a couple of days. However, Honeycomb is really worth mentioning. It doesn’t feel like a slapped together version of Android for tablets. It feels like it has been built from the ground up to suit tablets perfectly. The only problem is that it doesn’t feel like they’ve finished building just yet, which may be why they’re holding the source code. A lot of apps don’t look good on Honeycomb and a 10.1″ surface, and the Android Market will crash more often than not. At one point the XOOM froze for 8 minutes before it finally decided it was time to reboot, just because I tried installing Google Reader on the Market. Other than that, Honeycomb is silky smooth to use and makes full use of the huge screen real estate on the XOOM. If you have any questions leave them in the comments, and I’ll either answer them there, or in the upcoming review.
