Droid Xyboard 8.2 Unboxing and First Impressions

Verizon has sent me a second device as a part of its ambassadors program: a Droid Xyboard 8.2. I was particularly excited to get it, more than the Droid RAZR, because I've not had any real experience with tablet devices. I've had Blackberry phones for work and have extensively used an iPod Touch, but I've not owned an iPad or any other tablet.

The unboxing process was simple and straightforward as there wasn't much in the box. The tablet was on top with a wall charger, USB cable, and some booklets underneath. That's about all that anything comes with these days.

As the "8.2" part of the device's name would suggest, it's an 8-inch tablet. The smaller dimension is just a hair wider than a CD, if that gives you an indication of size.

I have almost nothing but good things to say about the hardware so far. The screen is bright and clear. It's just the right weight: not as heavy as you might guess for its size, but not so light that it feels cheap. The backing is aluminum with a rubber ring around it, and the rubber feels good for gripping in your hand. The only bad part is that the sleep/wake button and volume controls are on the back. You can kind of feel for them once you know where they're at, but you can't know on the first try which button you're about to push. If you don't want to turn the thing over to look, you have to slide your fingers up and down to be sure you're doing the right thing.

The software is where things go off the rails a bit.

In many ways, Android Honeycomb is most comfortable in landscape orientation. The initial setup screens are in landscape, one of the built-in keyboards offers a split configuration for landscape, and sometimes apps that can do both portrait and landscape launch in landscape despite me holding it in portrait orientation. That's another problem with where the hardware buttons are at: they're in the perfect spot for accessing with the fingers on your right hand when holding it portrait. When holding it in landscape, you have to move your hand to access them.

Honeycomb itself is not so great coming from Gingerbread on the RAZR because many of the interface elements are in completely different positions. The home and back buttons are on the left side instead of the middle, and the search button and app drawer launcher are now at the top instead of the bottom. The status bar was moved from the top to the bottom right, and everything in it is unreadable at a glance thanks to dark colors on top of a black background. I've run into issues here and there where it's not obvious how to dismiss some kind of info box and have done unintended things trying to get rid of them. The menu button for Honeycomb-ready apps is in the top right, while the menu button for non-Honeycomb ready apps is in the bottom left. Who in the world thought that was a good idea?

Not that you'll run into that last problem too often, as there are almost no tablet-optimized apps. I've heard for a while that there aren't many Honeycomb-ready apps, but it's worse than I thought. Even in the app market section titled "Staff Picks for Tablet", most of the apps I've tried from it are just phone apps that scale nicely.

On top of the rarity problem, many of the Honeycomb-ready apps I've tried just aren't great. Twitter client TweetCaster has potential, but it doesn't support conversations. Pulse seems to be a nice newsy app that takes RSS feeds and makes a grid layout of the stories, but it crashed when I tried to view a YouTube video. The Engadget app is a design nightmare, as its use of the extra screen real estate is puzzling at best. It's a bad, bad situation.

I've found that the device is very nice for browsing the Internet and playing some games, but I'm not sure yet what else I'm going to do with it. As I said, the hardware (buttons aside) is really nice. The software completely lets it down though, and the third party app situation is dire. If you've got any recommendations for good tablet apps, I'm all ears.