During yesterday’s Superbowl, Motorola hyped its new Xoom tablet – and took a major dig at Apple and its customers with their intro commercial, embedded above.
Motorola’s commercial is kind of fun – but it’s also a bit confused, given that the iPad has an insanely high satisfaction rating.
As successful as iPad has been though, and as much as it’s taken off as a music platform, there are a lot of people looking for something different.
The specs for the Xoom look interesting:
- 10.1-inch capacitive screen – 1280×800
- 5MP HD camcorder (front-facing cam included)
- Dual-core ARM-based Tegra 2 chipset,
- 1080p HD video playback.
- Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system.
- Adobe Flash 10.1 Player support.
- Built-in gyroscope, barometer, e-compass and accelerometer
The Motorolla Xoom is expected to sell for $799 for a 3G-enabled 32GB device, and will be available in late February.
It’s too early to know how the Xoom and other Android 3.0 tablets will compare to the iPad as a music platform.
The Xoom’s specs look good, at least compared to last year’s iPad. More powerful processors, especially, should make more powerful music apps possible.
Apple’s iPad platform has the advantage of hundreds of music apps and significant support from music app developers and hardware manufactures. These will be hard for the Android platform to catch up with. The competition, though, should ultimately beneficial to all tablet computer users.
Are you following the development of Android as a music tablet platform? What do you think of the prospects of the Xoom as a music platform?
via ShareMoto
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how many stylophone and theremin apps does it have? And shouldn't it be called the iXoom? And haven't Motorola realized that "Xoom" is unpronounceable, so nobody can ask for one in a shop?
That's a ridiculous attempt at re-using the energy from the original 1984 Apple commercials. And as is usual with such attempts, it completely misses the point.
I know this overlooks the portability issue, but I can't help thinking what a great desktop system I could build, or laptop I could buy for $799.
It also overlooks the synthesizer issue as well, in that it is not a synthesizer. Or is this Padtopia, or Apptopia, or Tabtopia, or…?
i was hoping this would be LESS expensive than ipad…..
given that the iPad has an insanely high self-satisfaction rating.
(fixed)
What has this got to do with synths?
This complaint is getting a little old.
What do you think is inside of synths nowadays? A tiny chip and some software.
The rest of it is packaging.
Do you really want to ignore new synths and new devices because they have a touch screen instead of a piano keyboard?
If synthtopia only talked about synthesizers it wouldn't be what it is today.
They cover pretty much everything related to electronic/computer music. The iPad started a whole new aspect of software music that didn't exist before and clearly the tablet is a new platform to play electronic/computer music with. Xoom, being a new tablet competing with the iPad, it is relevant to electroni/computer music.
Buuuuut if I have to explain, you clearly don't understand!
Also what Flancher said.
I'm waiting to see what Meego brings to the table…t, and then make the decision.
I naturally assumed it was pronounced as 'zoom'. The Xoom will specialise in Xylophone apps, naturally.
It's because this is a potential future candidate for music software.
Assuming google fix their audio latency issues in their OS (i'm still running 2.1 on my phone, so it might already be so), the android tablets could be a much better play field for music apps, considering there is no gateway into the store that could potentially make your months of hard work void.
Personally, I'd still just like to see a decent multi-touch windows based tablet. Though i heard that microsoft weren't keen to do the whole multitouch thing, possibly because of legacy app issues. Though I can dream of being able to use a multi-touch screen to control my favorite DAW.
Synthesis refers to a combination of two or more entities that together form something new.
Damn straight. When we get a mult-itouch tablet that runs a variant of Windows or OSX, all these phone-based tablets will be seen for the overpriced weaklings they are.
That's just what they WANT you to assume…
So that's what Bowie meant when he sang "pictures of jap girls in synthesis," the saucy devil.
2 things, the ipad and these devices have terrible latency issues, especially android. and until these devices run real applications instead of pared down applets, and use win7 or mac os, then these will still be toys. but as a control surface for larger rigs is great….
At the current price I would have to say "no" to the question in the title of this post.
Apple have both the "first mover" advantage and the "hot brand" advantage. With the announcement of Xoom pricing Apple can now add the "cheaper product" advantage as well.
The Xoom would have to offer something REALLY special to overcome all of that and I just don't see what that is.
And this is coming from someone who is a happy Android phone user and general Apple cynic.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gi…
"With NDK r5, we’re introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In fact, with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java….
In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code (via the OpenSL ES API, an open standard managed by Khronos, which also oversees OpenGL ES)…"
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gi…
"With NDK r5, we’re introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In fact, with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java….
In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code (via the OpenSL ES API, an open standard managed by Khronos, which also oversees OpenGL ES)…"
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gi…
"With NDK r5, we’re introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In fact, with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java….
In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code (via the OpenSL ES API, an open standard managed by Khronos, which also oversees OpenGL ES)…"
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gi…
"With NDK r5, we’re introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In fact, with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java….
In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code (via the OpenSL ES API, an open standard managed by Khronos, which also oversees OpenGL ES)…"
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gi…
"With NDK r5, we’re introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In fact, with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java….
In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code (via the OpenSL ES API, an open standard managed by Khronos, which also oversees OpenGL ES)…"
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gi…
"With NDK r5, we’re introducing new APIs that will allow you to do more from native code. In fact, with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java….
In addition to fully native applications, the latest NDK lets you play sound from native code (via the OpenSL ES API, an open standard managed by Khronos, which also oversees OpenGL ES)…"
😀