Motorola Xoom Review: The First Honeycomb Tablet Arrives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 23, 2011 11:57 PM ESTTransferring 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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
112 Comments
View All Comments
Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Wow, it loads pages three to eight times faster than the iPad? I didn't realize Tegra 2 was THAT much faster. Did you run that same page load test during the Atrix review? I must've glossed over it.Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Preview rather.dcollins - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
It's a combination of Tegra 2 and Chrome being much faster than Safari. I would assume Chrome for Android 3.0 was optimized even more heavily than Chrome for Windows, which remains the performance leader on the desktop.samirsshah - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
make that your SD Card reader SDXC rather than SDHC and just like that utility of Zoom increase twofold because you can store more media. Rumor has it that Apple is going SDXC in their new MacBooks.Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
SDHC should be good for most people's needs, they go up to at least 64GB no? I mean, even 32GB is a lot of music... Judging by MP3 player sales most people don't care to bring their entire collection of music with them, and if you're at home there's plenty of streaming solutions (or even if you aren't).Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
I like the intro... I also feel that at these prices tablets are a little bit too much of a luxury item for anyone that has or needs a laptop. For those of us, the tablet's still a third or fourth device (behind phone, laptop/netbook, and possibly a desktop); and at $800 I simply can't justify it. I'd rather upgrade one of my other devices. For people with just a desktop or a heavy desktop replacement laptop I imagine that tablets hold a higher appel, particularly if the don't need a portable system for work/study.Impulses - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Honeycomb is certainly an impressive release tho, given how quickly after Gingerbread it arrived (had obviously been in the works way earlier)... I'm excited to see where future wifi only models fall. If they sold it at $500 or under with 16gb or even 8gb and no 3g radio they'd fly off the shelves... But just like when the iPad first arrived, I think Moto is well aware they have a superior product so they can charge whatever they want for now.Enormously Hatworthy - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
There's a wifi only 16GB version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the way. Pricing for the 16GB 3G version looks to be around €699 so that could come down to €599 without the 3G radio.Plus it'll have Samsung's screen tech and it weighs a quarter of a pound less than the iPad.
Sounds like a winner to me.
Enormously Hatworthy - Thursday, February 24, 2011 - link
Oh and if you have the pleasure of owning one of Samsung's newer wifi enabled TVs, you'll be able to stream live tv to your Tablet.Unfortunately I don't have the pleasure :(
mcnabney - Saturday, February 26, 2011 - link
And by purchasing Samsung, you can forget about getting updated to 3.1 or 3.2.