A new tool - Motorola Xoom

I'm playing with a new tool, courtesy of Costco's 90 day return policy (for the same price as my original iPad)! If I like it, I'll keep it. I was able to download some of the major apps I use on my iPad: Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, Edmodo, Evernote, Kindle, as well as the Google apps, Docs, Gmail, Maps, Earth. I started this post in the Blogger app, but when I went back to the app, after it quit, I couldn't see the draft. So I am editing in the browser, something I cannot do on the iPad. (Blogger also lost my last edits, so I'm posting it again!)

The Xoom was fairly easy to set up, once I was able to manually type in my hidden wifi ID and password. The latest update to Honeycomb, Android 3.0 for tablets, downloaded automatically when the Internet connection was made. It took a few minutes to synch with my Google account, but now I can see all my Docs, and I can do basic editing on my Sites, another task I cannot do on my iPad.  I am trying to figure out the Android version of iPod/iTunes, to download my favorite podcasts. I am preparing for an mPortfolio workshop next Saturday at the ISTE conference, where I am focusing on iOS  apps on iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, and so we really won't be doing a lot with Google Apps. However, I will be doing a presentation on Student-Centered Interactive Portfolios with Google Apps on Wednesday, so I want to really assess how well it works on an Android tablet.

Editing typos on this screen is frustrating, to get the cursor in the right place (I am making the final edits with my Mac). I took this picture with the camera on the Xoom (has a flash...nice!), which uploaded it automatically to my Picasa Blogger album. It was easy to insert it from there with my Mac. Still trying to insert it with the Xoom.

Update: I returned it to Costco. Compared to other Android tablets it was bigger and slower! I didn't like it well enough to keep it.