Unfortunately I found it to be, well, shit compared to the iPad. I bought one for the lure of speed and returned it the next day when I realized that speed was very low on the list of properties that actually mattered. The total user experience is just far worse.
The Xoom feels like a PC that has better specs than a Mac. Yes, the frame rate is higher but the game sucks.
I seriously wish that webOS is going to show Apple some real competition. It's not healthy for one company to be so far ahead. Power corrupts.
Honestly, I had a similar first impression. But as I used it more, and saw iPad-specific apps begin to appear, it really is it's own device. If anything, the iPhone is a smaller, less functional clone of the iPad.
I can grok that, though for me I found myself going back to my MacBook Pro because the iPad needs propping up and is too slow (browsing). Ignoring slowness, admittedly a problem for any tablet in my opinion.
I don't think it's funny, I think it's a case of Apple identifying genuine weaknesses with the product and addressing them - it's what they should be doing.
Yes, I've tried a Xoom today, I also have bought an iPad a while back. Have you tried a Xoom yourself? I don't really see the relevance of the number of applications to the the UI experience.
I have tried one myself otherwise I wouldn't have asked.
The relevance is that the apps are what provide the UI.
For the iPad there are 65,000 of them customized to utilize the full screen. For the Xoom, there are 16 customized for the full screen, and the rest are literally just blown up phone apps, many of which don't even rescale properly.
There are 16 featured tablet apps in the market. Search for HD, THD or tablet, and you'll find considerably more. I'm working on one of them.
Google could stand to refine the UI for finding tablet apps, though in fairness to them, showing off 16 good ones on launch week was probably a reasonable move.
(Written on a tablet-adapted HN reader that isn't one of the 16, on a Xoom.)
Actually, I have been pretty disappointed with iPad apps. Many, many iPhone apps haven't been ported over, and the iPhone app experience on the iPad is pretty shoddy, not even using the Retina graphics.
How many apps do you need? Don't get me wrong, I think the iPad is very, very good. I use mine every day. But I just took it out and counted the apps I actually use really ever, and apparently 64,987 of those 65,000 apps could be deleted tomorrow with no apparent loss of functionality for me. Of the 13 remaining, at least half run everywhere (Kindle, Twitter, etc.), several others are nice-to-have ways to access web sites (Alien Blue for Reddit, Instapaper, FeeddlerPro for Google Reader), and only one by my count has no suitable replacement outside of the iPad (Papers).
Yes, everyone will have a different set of apps they use, but there's no realistic justification that "SearchEngines.ru Forum" (from the recent release page I just looked at) is adding much value to the platform. A lot of those 65,000 are apps like those. Realistically, if you have maybe 1500 of the most popular apps, you have enough to pretty well serve the market.
>>Realistically, if you have maybe 1500 of the most popular apps, you have enough to pretty well serve the market.
Yes, that's the point. It's just that iPad now has so many good quality apps compared to Android. It _may_ change in future, but for the time being iPad wins. (The total number of apps never matters, most of them are crap anyway)
That's a reason for some geeks to buy one. It's the reason I looked at buying one - not so much for Android, but for something to build a DIY dynabook on. I still probably will when someone makes something closer to Apple's industrial design, but I don't think that's going to help a whole lot with market share.
The Xoom feels like a PC that has better specs than a Mac. Yes, the frame rate is higher but the game sucks.
I seriously wish that webOS is going to show Apple some real competition. It's not healthy for one company to be so far ahead. Power corrupts.