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*OFFICIAL* Xoom vs iPad 2 Discussions

you know whats great about honeycomb though? its not HARDWARE specific. its not relegated to one hardware company. its for any hardware maker that wants android on their devices. All google wants is for you to run search/voice search on your mobile device. Google doesn't care about making money off hardware like Apple.

This is only the beginning. Xoom is the nexus one of tablets. by end of the year, we'll see multiple variants of honeycomb on various hardware. i like that. i like choice.
 
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I understand the difference. Excuse my abbreviated wording. I work in semiconductor engineering, providing the tools for companies like Samsung (one of our biggest accounts) to do their magic. The worldwide wafer shortage from the Japan quake/tsunami is about two weeks out. Not gonna be a good time for us.

Our company sounds similar and no doubt we share the same clientele.

In addition to raw wafer stock, I think we might need to factor potential loss at the Sharp display fabs as well, not to mention that the chips Japan does still produce play key roles in automotive applications.

The tragic loss of live and commerce there will impact us all - I would encourage all here to give as generously as possible to relief efforts.

The Red Cross has established three methods for submitting donations; visiting http://www.redcross.org, calling 1-888-4-HELP-BAY, or texting, “Red Cross” to 90999. The latter will make an automatic donation of $10 through your wireless carrier. If your stock sms client gives some trouble with that last option, I believe that Handcent will work.

A few of us are tracking the Fukushima reactor situation at - http://androidforums.com/politics-current-affairs/297590-japan-nuclear-situation.html
 
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If I did not care for Flash, USB host or game emulators, I would get an iPad 2. Who is kidding who???? No need to mod the thing- it works perfectly already and TONS of great apps now- not later. The quantity verses quality does not wash- even with that ratio in play, iOS destroys Android and will for at least the next year.

Most people IMO would be silly to not get the iPad 2. Us geeks are a minority of folks- most people could care less about the Android advantages (that do not need root).

As mentioned before, I bought an iPod 4 64gb and gTablet and was still about $85 less than the VZW version of the Xoom. I have the good Apple and Android stuff.

My perspective is the consumer in general and not the geek.

This is what I did today. I am on the list to get a 16GB iPad 2 (White). Should have it next week hopefully (they expect a big shipment within a few days). Already paid for. For what I need the iPad 2 is perfect. I really wanted a tablet that could play digital copies of movies rather easily. I have a bunch of movies I have on my 32GB iPod Touch and can easily transfer them to the iPad 2 via iTunes. I played with one today and it is extremely fast and butter smooth. Plus I already have a bunch of Apps from my Touch.
 
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This will change when iOS 5 is released later this year (probably in the summer). iOS 5 is going to be a huge update (rumored). Will change alot about Apple's mobile OS (iPad, iPhone & iPod)

And Steve Jobs will introduce it like this

"We are the first company to ever introduce widgets like this! They are an innovative way to interact with your home screens like NEVER BEFORE"

Blah blah like they are the first ones to do it. And everyone will cheer and go crazy and the android world will be like...."yeah and ..... "
 
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And Steve Jobs will introduce it like this

"We are the first company to ever introduce widgets like this! They are an innovative way to interact with your home screens like NEVER BEFORE"

Blah blah like they are the first ones to do it. And everyone will cheer and go crazy and the android world will be like...."yeah and ..... "
The worst part is how the Media starts spewing Job's propagenda to the rest of the world. 'The iPhone4 is revolutionary, it has the ability to Multitask. That's INCREDIBLE!!! You can now do many activities at once.'
 
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And Steve Jobs will introduce it like this

"We are the first company to ever introduce widgets like this! They are an innovative way to interact with your home screens like NEVER BEFORE"

Blah blah like they are the first ones to do it. And everyone will cheer and go crazy and the android world will be like...."yeah and ..... "

God help them if they add a "section of the screen where useful information pops up from time to time out of the way of the main activity on the screen." You know "information pertaining to tasks that might be running in the background like emails, system or app updates, news feed updates, IM's" etc. I mean, THAT would be revolutionary! :rolleyes: :D
 
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An interesting iPad2 vs other tablets Linepack/Sunspider performances comparison. Not sure how accurate it is, but thought I'd post :)
LINPACK
As we saw in the previous benchmarks, the iPad 2 has a significant increase in floating point performance vs. its predecessor. This was really pounded home by the LINPACK tests which showed the iPad 2 besting its predecessor with a 292% (~3x) improvement. We ran this rest on the Motorola Xoom running Android 3.0 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab running 2.2. The iPad 2 shows a surprising 336% improvement over the Motorola Xoom on its NIVIDIA Tegra 2 platform and a 724% increase over the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s 1GHz “Hummingbird ARM” processor.
ipad_2.004.png


Most surprising was that the iPad 2 was able to perform so significantly better than the Xoom in raw FP performance. The Xoom runs on the Tegra 2 SoC which is essentially a dual-core Cortex A9 platform like the iPad 2. Like NVIDIA, Apple has put its chip design team to work on improving performance on the lower-power version of the A9 configurations.
The doubling of memory bandwidth in the new iPad contributes to some of its FP advantage vs. the original iPad. But the only factor we can think of that would explain such a boost in LINPACK performance vs. both the original iPad and rival Tegra 2-based devices is that A5 must have full support for ARM's NEON vector extensions (the ARM equivalent of Intel's SSE instructions). The NEON extensions, along with the larger vector FPU (VFPU) to support them, are included by default in the A8 family, but are optional in the A9. NVIDIA's Tegra 2 opted for the smaller, lower-power, but weaker ARM FPU, while Apple seems to have included the beefier NEON VFPU in their implementation of the A9. Clearly this is the way to go, and we can expect other ARM SoC vendors to follow suit.
JavaScript Benchmarks
SunSpider is a JavaScript benchmark that shows off both the performance of a device’s JavaScript engine, and (to a lesser extent) the raw processing power of the underlying hardware. A poor JavaScript implementation on an insanely fast device can mask the true performance of the platform. Alternatively, a great JavaScript implementation can make up for a slightly slower system. More and more these days, the major JavaScript implementations are converging and borrowing ideas from each other. JavaScript tests are inherently single-threaded due to the nature of browsers. The SunSpider avoids many micro-benchmarks like we see in applications like GeekBench, and it attempts to benchmark processor-intensive tasks that might actually be found in a real Web application.
We’ve run this test on both the iPad and iPad 2 under iOS 4.3, as well as the Motorola Xoom under Android 3.0 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab under 2.2. The Android devices are both using Google’s V8 JavaScript engine while the iPad and iPad 2 are using Apple’s Nitro JavaScript Engine.
ipad_2.005.png

First, the new iPad’s hardware has resulted in a 35% improvement over the previous generation. We see that the Motorola Xoom and the iPad 2 are roughly evenly paired when it comes to this JavaScript benchmark. Despite the iPad 2’s advantage in raw processing power, the Xoom makes up for that with Google’s superior JavaScript engine. Yet the Samsung Galaxy Tab, with its older 1GHz “Hummingbird ARM” processor, can’t keep up and is considerably slower than the competition. As Apple continues to evolve their Nitro engine, however, they should be able to get additional JavaScript performance out of the same hardware.
Source
 
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I'd be happy if google announced the following...

"New to android... you now have the ability to sync data between your desktop and all of your droid devices. Droid now Does what your palm pilot Did 14 years ago..." :D

I don't know about you but my droid is all sync'ed up with music/pictures. So not sure what you're talking about.
 
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i HATE the way notifications steal focus in iOS. Want to know how to make an iphone user crazy? send him 5 texts in a row while he's trying to do something else.

I'm FULLY aware of that which is what my tongue in cheek response was all about. :) "iOS 27. NEW, INNOVATIVE.....notifications that don't drive you absolutely frackin' insane!" LOL! This is one of the things that Honeycomb gets *ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON* IMO. Yes, ok, they kinda copied the Windows design on that. I don't care. It works. People are used to that design. I don't want things popping up in the middle of what I'm doing every 2 seconds. Google really did that one very well. It's one of the major reasons I'm sticking with the Xoom vs an iPad2.
 
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Yes, I agree Google should be working on it's own version of "itunes" because that's where they are lacking but in the mean time there ARE ways to sync music and pictures.

Totally agreed with both of your statements, said same thing earlier.

FWIW - it's past rumor that Google is working on exactly that, as their iTunes-like app was seen briefly in the wild recently.

Details seem to remain under wraps, so we'll see if or when it comes to fruition.
 
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And Steve Jobs will introduce it like this

"We are the first company to ever introduce widgets like this! They are an innovative way to interact with your home screens like NEVER BEFORE"

Blah blah like they are the first ones to do it. And everyone will cheer and go crazy and the android world will be like...."yeah and ..... "

I am pretty sure Jobs will introduce it like this as well. He is a condescending A-Hole, no doubt about that. I just don't let those types of things prevent me from buying a device I know I will get alot of use out of. Widgets will definitely be Revolutionary and Magical:p
 
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Motorola Media Link - Overview - Motorola Mobility, Inc. USA

Or just use that. It's what I use. In any case, I don't see this as being an issue too much longer. Apple is pushing people into the "cloud" (don't get me started) with mobileMe. They're trying to get permission to put a user's music up there so they can have unlimited downloads and store all their stuff in a "cloud" solution. I could see Google doing something like that. Why "sync" when it can just be available in the "cloud"? The leaks we've seen from gingerbread's music service have shown something similar where your music gets copied to some unknown google "cloud" server and is available to you to stream at all times. So, syncing is unnecessary if this is the route they're taking.
 
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The geek vs. consumer thing is getting interesting. I have several friends who own macs and ieverything and who get along just fine with Itunes. Strangely enough they're buying android phones (LG Ally and Droid X). Also, they own an Ipad and commented on how they liked my Xoom better. Strangely enough the built in GPS was one of the things they liked best. Apple will likely always have a following and will likely be quite profitable but over time I think they'll see things slip away a bit.
 
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The geek vs. consumer thing is getting interesting. I have several friends who own macs and ieverything and who get along just fine with Itunes. Strangely enough they're buying android phones (LG Ally and Droid X). Also, they own an Ipad and commented on how they liked my Xoom better. Strangely enough the built in GPS was one of the things they liked best. Apple will likely always have a following and will likely be quite profitable but over time I think they'll see things slip away a bit.

I think you are right.
 
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The geek vs. consumer thing is getting interesting. I have several friends who own macs and ieverything and who get along just fine with Itunes. Strangely enough they're buying android phones (LG Ally and Droid X). Also, they own an Ipad and commented on how they liked my Xoom better. Strangely enough the built in GPS was one of the things they liked best. Apple will likely always have a following and will likely be quite profitable but over time I think they'll see things slip away a bit.

What's funny is I'm the opposite. I am a Tech Geek and have a Rooted HTC EVO, Rooted Nook Color (running Honeycomb), Overclocked Radeon 5850 etc. etc. and I just want a device (iPad 2) that runs great out of the box without rooting and tinkering. I use my EVO for GPS/Navigation, Free Wireless Tethering so forth and so on. I am anxious to get my iPad 2 (waiting for BestBuy to get their next shipment, already paid off). My brother is definitely a consumer and owns an iPhone 4 and iMac. These are good devices for him because he does not have to do much with them. Just turn on and use.
 
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I finally made a decision tonight and purchased an iPad 2. I debated over it and took another look at the XOOM tonight but just wasn't convinced. The XOOM just doesn't seem ready for prime time and I would rather not wait for it to mature.

I know I could root or tinker with it but the reality is I work 40 to 50 hours a week in IT and I just don't want to do that when I come home too. The iPad will work great and yes, I know there are limitations but I am fine with that.

Also influencing my decision is I do own an iPod touch and like it and have about $100 in apps I have purchased for it.

Finally, if something Android based does come on the scene that I want, my wife will be happy to have the iPad. If not, I have something I can use now.
 
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