Motorola Xoom: still a question of Google Android vs Apple iOS

We haven’t even convincingly answered the question What does one use in iPad for? and yet the world is already exploding with a bevy of touch screen “tablet computers” that hope to grab a piece of this lucrative market. Notable among them is the Motorola Xoom.

There are lots of reviews about the hardware and physical appearance and performance nuances of the Xoom and most of these are pit against the cool factor pretty much monopolised in this niche by the Apple iPad. But the bottom line is that on the hardware side (and considering the nature of tablet PCs do not give much latitude to designers as far as physical appearance), choosing between one or the other device in the tablet market is just a toss-up.

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People will be considering the Xoom most likely with the Apple iPad as the other option (the vice versa cannot be said to be necessarily the case though). And this essentially means a choice not between hardware features but between operating systems — Google’s Android running on the Xoom and Apple’s iOS running on the iPad.

As an Android user, this much I can say: Android can be relatively tougher to master. But it is because it offers far more features that allow one to use the device it runs on like a real computer. The iOS, like most Apple OS’s does a better job of humanising the user’s computing experience (which pretty much has been the key selling proposition of Apple since the early days). Unfortunately this also means a bit less access to its inner system bowels for the averagely-savvy user. An Android device allows access to the system’s folder structure, which means savvier PC users can manage their files the way they would in a conventional desktop of notebook computer, for example.

Either way, Android devices or the iPhones, I regard both using different sides of my brain. Androids with my right brain and iPhones with my left (or is it the other way around?). So there is no sense of pitting one against the other on a common field, as it will always be an apples-to-oranges exercise.

2 Replies to “Motorola Xoom: still a question of Google Android vs Apple iOS”

  1. mahal yung mga kakumpetensya ng apple. Pinakyaw daw kasi ni steve jobs yung mga pyesa para sa paggawa ng tablets. Ano nga yung tawag dun sa strategy na yun?

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