Hands-on Face-off: IPad 2 V Motorola Xoom 375
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the i-have-neither-one dept.
from the i-have-neither-one dept.
GMGruman writes "Is the iPad 2 all that it's cracked up to be? Or does the first Honeycomb Android tablet, the Xoom, still hold up? I spent an intense weekend comparing the two tablets, detailing in this review how each performs in a battery of tests."
Single page view here: (Score:5, Informative)
As posted before, Anandtech did it very well (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked [anandtech.com]
and their review helps as well http://www.anandtech.com/show/4215/apple-ipad-2-benchmarked-dualcore-cortex-a9-powervr-sgx-543mp2 [anandtech.com]
The key items to take away from both are, yeah the cameras suck but this is truly a real upgrade from the iPad. Performance alone puts is ahead of the older model as well as many available tablets. They did find out that the dual core processor is actually running at only 900mhz. While the Xoom pushes more pixels because of its 1280x800 versus 1078x768 the iPad2 pulls far ahead of it, beyond what the pixel count would account for. As for gaming, some games are already taking advantage of the new power, Infinity Blade has been updated and looks fantastic. This brings up the issue, will there be apps sold that are marked iPad2 required?
Better yet, its cheaper than its nearest competition. The only question is, how long before really good Android tablets come along?
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* to prevent kharma whoring feel free to mark it funny
A tie on web comparisons? Really? (Score:2, Informative)
One has Flash and the other doesn't.
Don't get me wrong, I have an iPad2 (I'm getting a wifi only Xoom later this month) and it's great and seems to beat Xoom in quite a few areas, but I cannot fathom how you can compare their web experiences and call them equivalent when flash still doesn't exist on iOS due to Jobs' ridiculous ego.
Re:Only needed one page (Score:4, Informative)
The xoom doesn't have flash either. Adobe hasn't approved it yet it might be available some time in April only 2-4 weeks behind the original schedule of mid march.
The xoom shipped with a nonfunctional SD card slot .
The big problem with android is there are to many hardware choices leading to huge gaps in functionality, which vastly screws up the available software.
any iphone app will work on an ipad, but not every android app will work on a honeycomb tablet.
I find this sucks. while I like the ipad as it is a lot smoother interface than android, I find it is to large for my personal tastes. So I have to wait for 12-18 months for some company to come out with a decent wifi only android tablet.
Then choose (Score:4, Informative)
I want to be able to decide for myself which software I run on my computer
Then buy an iPad and jailbreak it.
Stop pretending you don't have a choice when you do, just so that you can claim some rational reason for your choice beyond sheer hatred of Apple. If you want to not buy a product simply because you hate the company than admit that, and don't claim it's a technical issue when it's not.
Re:Lack of filesystem cripples the iPad/iPad2 (Score:2, Informative)
If you've got all that stuff as PDFs, you could sync those into the native ebook reader, iBooks.
It is not entirely true that you can't share files across apps: your contacts, photos, videos, music, ebooks (including PDFs) are accessible by any app that bothers to use them.
Lastly: you can add a filesystem whenever you want, jailbreaking the iPad is trivial.