Hands-On with The Motorola XOOM

     All Apple products aside, many people think of the XOOM as the closest competitor to the Adam because of it's extremely similar specs, and it's Android powered surface. If you look past the competitive nature of things, the XOOM is more like Adam's brother. The XOOM is the sign of things to come on the Adam. The Adam will be running Honeycomb once Notion Ink gets it ready. A few minutes with the XOOM was my peek into my Adam's future.

     Honeycomb is gorgeous. This is what the Adam should and will be in the coming months. The first thing to point out is that the Honeycomb browser is miles ahead of the Eden browser. I like the Eden browser, but the tab switching is difficult and slow, it has a tendency to force close too often to be useful, and it isn't easy enough to just Google something. The full tabs are my favorite part of the 3.0 browser as well as the desktop-ish features to make it more useful in the long run. The XOOM doesn't have flash, but the video in the picture above played just fine. My best guess is that it's in HTML5, even though it says flash on my laptop.

     One of the biggest things the Adam can learn from the XOOM is the home screen; it actually has one. Panels are nice, but they should not replace the entire home screen. Widgets, multiple home screens, and easy app arranging are fundamental parts of Android that they simply through out the window. I sincerely hope they don't get rid of the home screen in Honeycomb with Eden.

     The XOOM felt really snappy in everything it did just like all of the reviewers said it would. The biggest take away from that was the fact that the XOOM has almost the same innards as it's Adam brother. The Adam is set on the hardware front, but it's the software that counts. The software on the Adam is miles behind in it's current state. It's buggy, unresponsive, and just not ready for prime time. The Adam also has the thumbs up on Eden apps and ports galore. If Honeycomb isn't ruined by Eden, the Adam will shine like the sun on a June day.