Motorola Xoom Android tablet review

The 10in device starts at the same price as Apple's category-creating iPad, but there are many elements that put it behindSo here it is: the Motorola Xoom is about to land on our shores. This is a review, but because this is about tablets you know that it must involve comparisons. The Xoom doesn't live alone; if it were the world's only "media tablet" (to use the phrase analysts are using to try to split this species off from all the other tablet devices out there), that would be one thing. However, it's not even close to being the first. So yes – I am going to compare it to the iPad. • one-line review•First impressions• Power on• Home screen• Battery life• Email and calendars• Browser• Phone?• Flash Player• Notifications• USB ports• Keyboard and typing• App selection• Music player• Video• Verdict• For and againstIn a nutshell: not yetAnd here's the one-line review: nope, not yet, Motorola/Google. The iPad still has it, by some distance. Honeycomb is nice, and the Android things that are better than iOS are still better (cough *notifications* cough), but tablets are harder than smartphones. Also, app stores really matter, and the Android Market isn't nearly there.If you compare like-for-like storage (the Xoom starts at 32GB) then the Xoom is exactly the same price as the same-storage iPad 2 at £479 from PC World (though at Amazon it's a whopping £570 or £660 for the 3G version).So, finally, we have an Android tablet that's the same price as Apple's and even slightly bigger in screen. Kudos to Motorola.First impressionsIn person, the Xoom has an impressively large screen: like an angler with a fish, you feel you need to spread your hands really wide to hold it. In fact, the screen is only just wider, and very slightly thinner than the iPad's; yet the overall effect of the 16:9 aspect ratio (compared to the iPad's 4:3) is that you're holding something that's designed in Cinemascope. This turns out not to work in its favour, but we'll come to that.The shape is slightly thicker in the centre than the edges, so the edges are raised from a flat surface – good for picking up quickly.There's not a huge weight difference compared to the iPad 2, though it looks about twice as thick when put on a surface.Unlock & power upTurning it on is just a matter of … where's the button? For reasons best known to themselves, the Xoom's designers have hidden the power button on the back, on the top left, recessed into the chassis. (Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC had the same perplexed reaction.) If you need a laugh, hand one to someone who's never held one, and see how long it takes them to find it. One minute is good going, by which time they will have prodded the USB output socket, HDMI output socket, and power input socket, and volume buttons (all of which, sensibly enough, are on the side of the device).OK, power on. And now we have Honeycomb – Google's 3.0 version of Android. It has clearly been almost completely rethought for a tablet (though there are a couple of leftover references to "phone" in the system: rather than the PIN or "draw a pattern" screen of an Android phone, you get a padlock sitting in a circle; you have to drag the padlock to the edge. (Neat, though it puzzled some people I tried it on: they pressed the padlock, they pressed the circle, they didn't find the "pull the padlock to the edge" idea self-evident.)Home screen: arm the photon torpedoes!The whole typography and look of Honeycomb seems to come from someone whose favourite film was JJ Abrams' version of Star Trek, with lens flare (those haloes around any light) galore and typefaces that are all wonderfully flat curves. The default home screen on the Xoom is a deep blue background. As on the Android smartphones, there are five home screens; Honeycomb, though, arranges them in a carousel – you start in the centre, with two empty ones either side to which you can add apps when you swing them around, or use the button in the top right menu.And also in the top right menu, there's a button with "apps", which takes you down one level into an "apps folder". How does that make sense? Why is Honeycomb giving us a pit into which apps are dumped, while also presenting you with four completely empty screens? It's not as if there are too many apps: the default installation has 24 buried in that folder, while each of the five screens can take at least 48 apps. This is bad user interface design which reduces the chance of people using apps – and hence the tablet. Forcing the user to head down into a folder and then make apps return to the surface to use them means you're less likely to find them. Some people (because remember, some people who use computers and tablets are not that savvy) won't notice the "Apps" tag in the top right for quite some time. The most powerful setting on any computer is "default": it's what most people use most of the time. Google isn't doing itself any favours with the Honeycomb defaults.Battery life: sufficient (with asterisks)Much is made of the iPad's long battery life. That's because a tablet where you had to keep charging it as much as a laptop (typically an hour or two) would get very wearying. Their utility comes from the fact that you can pick them up and not have to worry whether you charged them this morning if you use them, say, an hour or two each day.The Xoom does well – it achieved as much as the iPad. Ten hours, more or less – although note that Flash will halve that. You think you don't spend all your time watching Flash? If you open a lot of commercial web pages with adverts or (of course) watch YouTube, you're hitting Flash. More on this later.Flash aside, the battery life is longer than a typical working day. You can tweak the life by changing how quickly the screen turns off, dimming the screen, turning off Wi-Fi, and so on.Note though that setting the screen's off delay will mean turning it on a lot – and reaching around for that power button quickly gets tedious. In fact, that back-mounted button is my major criticism of the Xoom itself; yes, it falls under the left index finger if you pick the device up in the correct orientation, but you won't always. And if it's lying down and turns off, picking it up is a pain. Contrast having a button on the front and/or side (both, with the iPad): much easier to activate.Email and Calendars: lookalike, work-unalikeIf Apple were the sort of company that was keen on litigation over look and feel of interfaces, it would be after Google right now over the mail app: it looks almost exactly like the iPad's, but with slightly less panache. There's a left column of incoming emails, and the body of the selected email taking up exactly the same proportion of the screen as on the iPad app.Honeycomb also doesn't bring a unified mailbox. If you have multiple accounts and want to murder your email quickly, tough luck. You still have to pick from separate accounts. Odd that HTC, for example, can figure this out in the Sense UI that it puts on its Android phones, but Google itself can't. Or is it leaving a gap so franchisees can differentiate themselves?That said, the mail program is workmanlike. There's nothing dramatically clever; it's functional. The Honeycomb calendar is good – the layout is clearer than Apple's.BrowserHoneycomb gives you Chrome, with tabbed browsing. That makes it slightly faster to move between tabs (you can finger-scroll them along) than using the iPad metaphor, where you have to hit a button and then choose from the open pages or create a new one; the Xoom/Honeycomb also gives you up to 16 tabs (the iPad, nine). A slight annoyance is that most sites will still recognise the browser as a mobile one – despite the screen being as big as some laptops'. You'll get served the mobile site, which in many cases isn't going to be the right experience for a tablet. No doubt in time sites will update their browser recognition. Here's hoping.Is this a phone?Despite