Recently took my aunt’s Motorola Xoom for a test drive.  She found a great deal on the Android 3.0 tablet, it was essentially risk-free.  She asked if I could play with it then teach her how to use it.  I couldn’t refuse an opportunity to play with another nerd-toy, she knew that I could compare it to my experience with an iPad and tell her whether this was a good purchase for her needs.

So that was the first logical question:  What are her needs?

• reading personal & work email
• surfing the Internet (searches)
• social networking (Facebook)
• games (like mahjong, scrabble & Angry Birds!)

These are basic use cases, all easily performed on the Xoom.  Some apps like Gmail, require you to link your Google account after which you are presented a nice dashboard view.  The Motorola Xoom was the first Android tablet to ship with the Honeycomb Operating System (Android 3.0 OS).  The overall desktop view is very clean and the UI for navigating and moving icons around is fairly intuitive.

Likes:

• There are so many Android apps (and lots of free ones).  There is no submitting your application to Apple for approval.  You can create your own app and install it on your machine.  You know, that practice software developers have been doing for decades.  (Of course this could also be in the cons category since you can make the argument that more poorly developed, less QA’d apps will make it into the Android Marketplace vs the App Store).
• I like that I can browse the device’s filesystem.  I installed an Android App called Astro and I could see all the files on the tablet which I was able to copy using a standard USB connection rather than the proprietary, must-connect-to-itunes, iPad-to-computer interface.
• I could watch any video file I wanted without converting.  Again, there was an app for that, I installed Mobo Player and I could play AVI’s.  Seems like such a novel concept.
• Integration with Google accounts

Dislikes:

• The keyboard input is sometimes slow and unresponsive.  At times I found it excruciating trying to highlight text and cut/copy and just resorted to backspacing chunks of text and retyping.
• The browser will sometimes lag which results in screen taps being buffered and then multiple taps happen all at once.  You won’t want to open more than three tabs when browsing.
• No Dragon Dictation for Android (yet).  If I can’t use one of my favorite apps, that hurts.  Android Evernote looks good though.
• I missed Apple’s  smart gestures, still have to try SWYPE.

The Xoom came with a lot of extras, it was ~$500 for a 32GB wifi-only model with:

• a case/stand
• a speaker dock
• full-size keyboard attachment
• Car charger

This works out to being >$100 cheaper than the comparable iPad (since Apple products never come with peripherals or other useful adapters).

The verdict?  I could see myself owning a Xoom (or other comparable Android tablet) over an iPad.  The experience was very comparable despite all of my dislikes.  I will say that an iPad still seems much more intuitive.  Xoom does show Android as a very promising platform.