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This is What Motorola's GED Tab Was Meant To Be
After a surprisingly quick splash test, Motorola's first and only "pure Android" (a.k.a. GED, "Google Experience Device") tablet, the Xoom, has started receiving OTA updates to Android 4.1(.1), or "Jellybean", successor to Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich", which itself succeeded Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" which the Xoom originally shipped with.
Fans of the Xoom will recall its inglorious beginnings. It was the only Android developer's reference device ever to be denied a Nexus branding by Google. I don't claim to know why this was the case, except to say that Google admittedly rushed Honeycomb to keep manufacturers from jerry-rigging older versions of Android onto their tablets and (perhaps forever) tarnishing the name of Android for tablets in the process.
Unfortunately, out of the box at least, Honeycomb didn't do much to solve the problem. The first version of the software often failed to scale smartphone apps to the full 10.1-inch screen size; it didn't natively support microSD cards even though the Xoom shipped with one; and it didn't come with an app to support Adobe Flash for Android. In addition it wasn't, perhaps, the most stylish or best designed tablet out there, despite some impressive (on paper, at least) hardware specs to rival the iPad 2.
All of these problems (except for the design, which is a matter of aesthetics, and which at least evaded Apple's "trade dress" litigation) were solved by updates to Honeycomb, and the creation by Adobe of a suitable Flash app. Nonetheless they essentially doomed the Xoom (poor marketing probably didn't help), the U.S. Wifi version of which is no longer available except, perhaps, refurbished.
The Xoom failed so spectacularly than at Google I/O 2011, attendees were given a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which isn't even a proper Android reference device. Nor did the name carry over to its "Xyboard" successor.
For those who purchased the Xoom, however, and had patience for the problems to be solved, the rewards came. Even when the aforementioned problems were fixed, there was another serious issue plaguing the Xoom (apart from the persistent lack of tablet-optimized apps, which is more of an issue in the nerd echo chamber than in real life where app design aesthetics are of secondary concern at best):
Honeycomb was laggy and sluggish. That was true even without multi-tasking; the on-screen keyboard was especially sluggish. And there was really nothing about the OS to make it worth recommending over iOS.
Then came Ice Cream Sandwich. The Xoom wasn't the first tablet to receive ICS; that distinction went to the Ainol Novo 7, a Chinese MIPS tablet, and the Asus Transformer Prime wasn't far behind. But the Xoom was among the early recipients, and ICS finally brought Android for tablets near to par with the iPad version of iOS. Responsiveness improved significantly and the lagginess nearly vanished. Nearly.
Still, at best ICS made Android for tablets more comparable to iOS for the iPad: almost as smooth but not quite. Widgets, text-to-type, and other pre-existing features of Android may, arguably, have been better than anything on its iOS counterpart, but these didn't necessarily commend the OS itself. But Google said they had held some "game changers" back for the next version, presumably because they weren't quite ready for prime time.
Now that Jellybean has arrived, I can confirm that Google wasn't blowing hot air: with Jellybean, the once lowly Xoom has risen from the ashes (for those lucky enough to own one) and proved itself worth the more-expensive-than-iPad 2 price that it cost buy. Why? Because the Xoom is now, all around, better than or at least as good as the iPad 2 (as an OS; it still lacks as many tablet-optimized apps, but this is not specifically an OS issue).
Project Butter has delivered exactly what it promised: a buttery smooth experience. The OS and its apps load and run smoothly, and with visually-appealing transition effects. I can only imagine how much better the experience must be on a quad-core tablet like the N7, because it makes the dual-core Xoom feel like a quad-core tablet.
Google's enhanced Voice Search/Voice Actions makes Siri look like a marketing gimmick and sound like Stephen Hawking's long-lost sister by comparison. "Majel" (presumably the code name of the voice output designed by the Google X laboratory, later turned over to Google's search division for what was then code named "Google Assistant" before being renamed as simply "Voice Search") sounds almost like a real person, so much so that the occasional stutter in her speech is almost jarring.
Ten minutes before I started writing this I saw an Apple commercial for Siri, and the degree to which Apple's virtual assistant sounds like an inanimate robot stands out in stark contrast. And whereas my experiences with Siri showed her voice recognition to have significant weaknesses, Majel is surprisingly good at knowing what I am saying, even with a noisy background and when thrown ambiguous words (there/their, etc...). The range of searches and requests she handles is remarkable, and even when she can't answer directly, her search results are highly relevant.
And then there's Google Now (shown in the image above), the new "predictive" search function that tries to guess what you will search for before you search for it. Searching only once for local weather added a "weather card" to my Google Now, which dynamically updates itself with notifications as the weather changes. I don't doubt, as Google says, that Google Now will only get better with use, and I look forward to seeing its evolution as it learns more about me, and as future updates roll out.
The iPad 2 may have a slightly better screen than the Xoom, and maybe a better overall design, but otherwise the Jellybean update finally transforms the Xoom into the "iPad 2 killer" it was always meant to be... sadly, too late for the Xoom, but not for N7 and future tablets that come with it or will be upgraded to the new version.
The iPad 2 will not be receiving Siri (and Siri isn't as good as "Google Assistant" anyways), and it's anyone's guess when the new iPad will, nor will either one (or any of the iPhones) likely receive Google Now, at least any time soon. In fact I would argue that, in functional terms, Jellybean makes the Xoom (for now) the second best tablet, and best 10.1-inch tablet, on the market today. It will no doubt be superseded for this soon, and for hardware is already outdated, but Jellybean proves that software, not hardware, has become the critical "bottleneck" for mobile devices today. It also proves that there is wisdom in buying Google Experience Devices over other, perhaps flashier, Androids.
If there is anything surprising about Jellybean for Xoom, it is only that the general layout of the UI remains largely unchanged, unlike the N7 which has repositioned on-screen menu buttons (for better gaming, presumably) and a more smartphone-like layout reminiscent of the Galaxy Nexus. Was this merely for consistency for existing owners, or has Google decided that a 10.1-inch device is fundamentally different in ways that require a different layout? My guess would be the latter, but we won't know for certain until a new 10.1-inch tablet launches with Jellybean pre-installed.
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