Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Xoom snapped in the hallway
I GOT MY WIFE a Motorola Xoom Media Tablet for her birthday and swore I would not be spotted using it. But I'm allowed to share first impressions.
It's a lot lighter than the first generation iPad and it feels lighter than the iPad 2 I've used. It runs smoothly with its 1.2GHz CPU and Android 3.2.but its lack of an SD card surprised me. That said, its built-in MotoCast streaming capability looks like it will work a charm if I can serve the Xoom proper wifi broadband. I will cast the video and audio clips from the cloud, not from a local laptop because I can't get reliable one megabit per second upstreaming.
I couldn't push the Xoom's screen to as bright a level that I can achieve with the iPad. However, its colours and viewing angles are better than the iPad. And it snaps through apps smoothly.
During the summer, we'll have more to say about the screen's performance while out in the wild exploring geocaches. We'll see how the back seat kids like using the Xoom's built-in Flash and whether they prefer it to the iPad's YouTube app. Most importantly, we will ruthlessly put its splashproofing through the wringer.
Bernie Goldbach curates links about Android.
