Xoom and the Android tablet experience

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The best presents are often those which are totally unexpected; thus, your editor was doubly pleased to find a box from Google on the front step with a Motorola Xoom tablet inside. The Xoom is one of the first full-size Android tablets on the market; it is also one of the few to run the elusive "Honeycomb" Android release. One of the best ways to justify playing with new toys is to find a way to call it work; thus, here is a review of the device and how Android is shaping up on tablets in general.

The Xoom, at 730 grams, is surprisingly heavy; much of that weight seems to be a battery which, it is claimed, can support "up to 10 hours" of video playback time or over three days of audio playback. It features a 1200x800 screen, a 1GHz dual-core processor, 32GB of internal storage, cameras on the front and back, two speakers, and an HDMI port. The power button is cleverly hidden on the back; your editor has seen a few people struggle to find it. Two volume buttons on the side are the only other physical buttons on the device. There is a cellular interface, but it is tied to Verizon's CDMA network; happily, the device is happy to operate in a WiFi-only mode.

Each new gadget seems to come with a new sensor; your editor approves of this trend wholeheartedly. The Xoom, as it turns out, has a barometer built into it. Few applications make use of it at this point. Sadly, the leading barometer application seems to be "Barometer HD," which was evidently written under the impression that the device would never be subject to less than 950 millibars of pressure (or would never be operated above sea level). Your editor, whose home is currently at 827 millibars, will get little use from this application.

Android on tablets

The Android developers have evidently been working flat-out to create a version of the distribution which is well suited to tablets. The result generally works well, but it is clearly a work in progress that will require some adjustment from people who are used to the handset version of Android. To begin, the traditional four buttons (home, back, menu, and search) found on handsets are not present on the Xoom. The lower left of the screen often (but not always) contains replacements for some of those buttons:

The home and back buttons are usually there, at least. Sometimes one will see a strange grid pattern (on the right, above) that turns out to be the menu button - except when a different menu button (more like the version seen on handsets) appears in the upper right corner instead; that is an inconsistency that is likely to create some confusion.

One other button often found in the lower left is a pair of overlapping rectangles. That button turns out to be the way to switch between running applications; it presents a row of thumbnail screenshots which, by all appearances, has been strongly influenced by the MeeGo "zones" mechanism. Tapping on a thumbnail, naturally, switches to the corresponding application. Annoyingly, a maximum of five applications (eight in portrait mode) can appear in this list. On the Xoom, the "long tap on home" reflex that most Android users pick up eventually is no longer useful; the interface designers have used some of the extra screen space to move that functionality to its own button instead.

Many other parts of the interface have not yet caught up to the fact that there is a lot more screen space available, though. Only allowing a single application to be on the screen at a time makes great sense on a handset; there simply is not room for more. But the tablet's resolution is comparable to that of the workstations your editor used for years; there could be value in having a calculator on-screen with a mail client, or a messaging client together with a browser. MeeGo allows this kind of sharing of the screen; Android, at this point, does not.

Quite a few of the applications have also not caught up to the idea that they have some room to play with; this is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more true of add-on applications from the market than the built-in applications from Google. The K9 mail client will use the full screen for the message list, or to display a single message, but it cannot do both at the same time; a quick check shows that the Gmail client is a bit smarter that way. Calculators spread themselves across the entire screen to the point that using them requires significant arm movement; perhaps this can be seen as a different type of feature bloat. One welcome change is that the browser has made room for a tab bar; the "window" concept from the handset version appears to be gone.

The on-screen keyboard has, naturally, expanded to fill the available space; that makes it easier to deal with, but does not change the fact that soft keyboards are a pain for any sort of serious typing. The keyboard seems to have regressed a bit from the version found on Gingerbread-based handsets; in particular, the ability to type numbers with a long keypress on a top-row key is gone. One could explain that change by saying that the tablet interface appears to be moving away from the "long touch" interaction mode in general, but some other characters are still available that way. Some features (switching languages, for example) have moved to their own buttons below the keyboard.

Notifications no longer appear at the top of the display; instead, they cluster in the bottom right corner. Tapping on the clock (which is also in that corner) yields a list of notifications; sadly, there is no "clear" button, so notifications must be dismissed one at a time. This corner also replaces the root-screen menu found on handsets; the system settings menus are found here, for example. It is also used to lock the screen orientation (nice when setting the device flat on a table) and the display brightness. Notifications can be disabled altogether; this feature is not available on handsets.

The tablet format, as a whole, represents a new and interesting way of dealing with computers; one suspects that we have not yet begun to figure out how we can make the best use of these devices. Your editor was not sold on the format, but, it must be said, tablets make a nice way of reading online content or scanning mail from an armchair. A tablet on the dining-room table (which is where the Xoom is likely to end up) is handy for checking the news and such. For longer (book-length) reading a device with an electronic ink display (or a real book) is still preferable. Any task involving real typing needs a real keyboard. For everything else, the tablet is a nice device to have.

Hackability

One of Android's best features is that a fair number of the devices out there allow (intentionally or otherwise) a relatively high level of user access. The list of devices supported by CyanogenMod is eye-opening. So, when a device like the Xoom wanders in the door, it is natural to wonder how open it is. The answer is that it is too soon to say, but there are some encouraging indications.

To begin with, rooting the device requires nothing special. The Xoom has not been locked down by Motorola, so a simple:

fastboot oem unlock

command works with no further fuss required. One of the first things developers have done with this access is to produce a replacement kernel which allows overclocking, adds the TUN module for OpenVPN support, and, nicely, enables the SD card slot which is not usable (pending "a future software update") with the stock Xoom distribution.

There do not appear to be any full replacement distributions available for the Xoom yet; in any case, proper, built-from-source replacements will not be possible until Google sees fit to release the Honeycomb source. That will, sadly, delay the availability of distributions like CyanogenMod indefinitely. This delay can only serve to reduce the level of developer excitement around Android-based tablet devices.

But what alternatives are there? It's worth pointing out that MeeGo still exists, and that, someday, somebody may actually release a mainstream tablet device based on it. MeeGo could have some advantages on this format; it is more like a traditional operating system, which may make sense on a device that can behave more like a traditional computer. If somebody can get devices out there sometime soon (that seems to be a big "if" with MeeGo), they might just go somewhere. The upcoming tablet based on WebOS also bears watching for a number of the same reasons. Android for tablets is nice, but it is far from finished, and it has not, yet, taken over this segment. There is an opportunity here; it will be interesting to see who grabs it.

