Motorola Xoom Review: The First Honeycomb Tablet Arrives

Transferring Content

The USB connected notification is now gone in Honeycomb. When you connect the Xoom to a PC via a USB cable you just get a drive letter with no extra fanfare. Connect it to a Mac and things are a little different.

Xoom on a Windows PC

Xoom on a Mac

Google switched to using the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) for USB storage, which isn’t natively supported under OS X. To get USB file transfer working under OS X you need an additional app. Google provides Android File Transfer which does get the job done, however it does have some quirks (mainly related to deleting files required by an app that has been used recently or overwriting files).

Music & Video Playback

Honeycomb finally adds a pretty decent looking music app to the OS. The Music app gets a notification icon as well so you can tap to pause, play and skip songs while you’re playing around in other applications.

Video playback is nice on the large screen however there’s still the issue of file format support in Android (.3gp and .mp4 are supported, baseline profile H.264 only). Until we get Kal-El class SoC hardware I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to have a chance at playing most video content without transcoding.