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.

Apple Being Singled Out Over Foxconn Isn't Fair, but That's Fine

The Nightline special on Foxconn and Apple was an interesting look inside the world of electronics manufacturing in China. It's interesting to me to see how the issue has exploded of late, as it seems to come and go as various issues crop up. I'm not sure what the catalyst was this time, but here we all are looking at it.

It's a weird thing for most Americans, I expect. Despite the very real issues with things like too much overtime and underage workers, most reports say that Foxconn's factories really are among the best in China. I've likened factories with dormitories to the phenomenon of company towns in America. It's not a perfect analogy, but having company towns is a phase that this country went through during its industrial development. They weren't great for workers, but they're better than subsistence farming. The same goes for Foxconn in China.

It's not that dissimilar from the sweatshop scandals that plagued Nike in the '90s. The Nightline piece had someone bring that up, though the reference was about a different point. A number of economists have argued that sweatshops are a good thing in comparison to subsistence farming, which does make them a net positive. That's certainly not to say that industrial development should get to the sweatshop stage and stop. The existence of sweatshops and cramped factories could overall be a good thing for a country, provided things continue to progress from there.

The point about Nike from the show was that the industry leader will take the most heat for industry-wide problems. I'm sure that's a factor in Apple getting most of the negative publicity for Foxconn's abuses when plenty of electronics firms use its factories for assembling devices. Apple is also fantastically profitable, far more than the rest of the companies that have contracts with Foxconn. It has the best capacity to do something good for the workers there.

At one point, a Foxconn executive says he'd gladly double the pay of the workers on the lines assembling Apple products if the company asked for it. Using Horace Dediu's numbers, the iPhone has a 55% profit margin on an average selling price of $650. He estimates that the labor cost for each phone is somewhere between $12.50 to $30. If labor costs doubled (corresponding to a doubling of worker pay), the profit margin on each device would fall to somewhere in the 50% to 53% range. That's still an incredible margin, even for a company with typically high margins on all its products as Apple tends to have.

So while it's not completely fair for Apple to catch a lot of the heat for the issue of labor in Asia, I'm OK with it. Apple responded to getting singled out by Greenpeace by taking real actions to make its products better (or less bad, really) for the environment. Now, few companies talk about their green initiatives as much as Apple does. It's been a good thing.

Apple now seems to be doing something about the labor issue. It has publicly released factory audit results in the past couple of years and now has released a report detailing all of its suppliers. Last month, it became the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, and it has funded the biggest audit ever of Foxconn (currently underway).

If Apple is able to get real change for the better in Foxconn, it's even better than its green initiatives in one way. The latter only affect Apple products, but if Foxconn gets better, that affects people who make many other firms' products too. I'd like to see those other firms step up in the way Apple has, but we'll see if they do in the coming months. Pressure from multinationals that make things in China is the only way things are going to keep progressing there, as no real organized labor movement is allowed by law there.

It's not ideal if the only forward progress is due to American companies pushing the Chinese companies while themselves being pushed by media scrutiny and popular outcry, but it's at least some forward progress.

OS X Mountain Lion Might Have More Surprises

Apple announced a big shift in its Mac OS X strategy today. It's dropping the "Mac" from the name, releasing new versions of it on an annual basis, and it's making it closer to iOS than ever. It also announced Mountain Lion, OS X version 10.8 to ship this summer. John Gruber already cataloged the other big changes going on, so read about them on Daring Fireball.

It's obvious to everyone that Apple is now trying to get OS X and iOS in relative sync feature-wise with iCloud being the glue between them. What doesn't seem to be obvious is that what we see from Mountain Lion today is incomplete, quite possibly very incomplete.

A lot of the "operating system" changes announced today, Notification Center aside, are just application changes. There's a new notes app. iChat is now Messages. A lot of things now hook into iCloud APIs that belong to, well, iCloud and not OS X proper. There are a lot of major changes that deeply change parts of the experience, but none of them go that deep technologically that I can see.

I suspect that there will be more to this thing, possibly quite a bit more. The reason is because iOS 6 hasn't been announced yet. New versions of iOS have typically been shown off in the early spring*, and it's still February yet. Apple is not going to tip its hand months early as to what's in iOS 6 with this Mountain Lion reveal that didn't get its own big press event.

If I was a betting man, I'd put money on the idea that last year was a template for things going forward. The new iPad comes in March and the new iPhone comes six months later in September. The new iOS reveal will be at WWDC, with it and a new OS X version releasing soon thereafter.

That means there easily could be more goodies in Mountain Lion with iOS 6 analogues that we won't know about until the summer. Apple is trying to show that it does care deeply about the Mac, but the iOS ecosystem is clearly the company's top priority. Getting a look at Mountain Lion now is cool, but the real big reveal, which could include more features for OS X, isn't coming for months.

*The Apple Keynotes podcast provides and handy record of product announcements. iPhoneOS 2 was first shown off March 6, 2008. iPhoneOS 3 was first revealed 3/17/09. iOS 4 was first demoed April 8, 2010. In 2011 there was an early spring iOS announcement, but it was the iPhone-and-iPad-unifying version 4.3 along with the iPad 2 on March 2. Our first peek at iOS 5 came at WWDC on June 6, but the later date probably came from a combination of Lion getting ready to ship and the fact that the iPhone 4S launch was going to be later in the year than normal. And also to set up the new cycle, natch.

The Droid RAZR Has Undeniably Bad Battery Life

I've had some time now with the Droid RAZR that Verizon sent me for review. One thing stands out more than anything else: the battery life is terrible.

Early on, I decided to see if everything I had heard about the awful battery life on the 4G LTE network was true. So, I turned off WiFi for a Saturday morning to simulate being out and about (I'm a hermit) and used it for some consistent Twitter activity and podcast downloads.

I woke up that morning at 8:40 am. I checked in again on the battery at 12:40 pm. In that time, it probably had about three hours of consistent use and one hour of idling. It was down to 50% already. I turned WiFi back on, and the battery drained a bit slower. Yes, you read that right: this is a phone that can actually save battery life by turning WiFi on.

I tweeted about that experience, and someone recommended an app called Juice Defender. It turns the radios on and off automatically based on whether the phone is in use, and it allows connections every 15 minutes (by default; that's configurable) for things like email checking. I installed it and kept the defaults, and it did help when not in heavy use. It wouldn't do a thing in the usage case above though because the 4G data usage is what was draining the battery so much.

The second thing I tested in relation to battery life is turn-by-turn navigation. I used it this past weekend on a short trip my wife and I took to north Georgia.

The particular drive I used it on was for about an hour, and it wasn't in perfect conditions. It was in an area with only 3G data, so the 4G was not a factor. It also was an area with signal coming and going (but never lost entirely). The GPS was on the whole time, obviously.

The app Battery Indicator said it had 97% battery when we left, and it was at 64% when we arrived. One hour sucked down a full third of the battery's capacity. I don't have a car charger because Verizon didn't supply one, but I have a feeling that having it plugged in would only slow the battery drain rather than halt it or even recharge it while navigating.

The phone comes with a Smart Actions app (which automates settings changes), and the first one it suggested to me was a battery saver action. It comes with a Guided Tours app from Verizon, and under "Basic Setup and Usage Videos" is "Battery Conservation Tips and Tricks". The rest in that section are basic orientation videos that are nowhere near as technical. On top of that, Motorola and Verizon released the Droid RAZR Maxx a mere three months after the RAZR, and it actually does have acceptable battery life. Someone knew this thing had poor battery life prospects.

The bottom line: unless you always have a charger nearby or are almost always in WiFi range, you will have to constantly worry about battery life with a Droid RAZR.

Romney Does Indeed Have a Rick Santorum Problem

Having largely vanquished Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney is probably going to be the Republican nominee for president. It looks like Rick Santorum is going to make things as interesting as possible until the end though.

This Reuters op-ed says that Romney has a Santorum problem, and Googlebomb jokes aside, I agree. Gingrich was an easy target. He made a lot of enemies within the party back in the '90s, and he's abrasive and pompous to boot.

Santorum is and has been the most earnest strong conservative of the field. Aside from his endorsement of Arlen Specter in 2004, there's not a whole lot Romney can pin on the guy from a negative campaigning standpoint. That was the weapon that Romney used to slay Gingrich, but it'll be much harder to use it against Santorum.

Here's the thing: Santorum has no chance at winning the general election. None. He even lost his Senate seat by the largest margin ever for a Republican incumbent. Many of his views lie far outside the American mainstream, such as the idea that all contraceptives are bad. He's simply too conservative to win a national election.

Romney's problem is that Santorum isn't completely out of line with his party's mainstream in the way that Ron Paul is. Paul might be the most conservative guy in the race depending on how you define "conservative", but his appeal is largely limited to the libertarian fringe of the G.O.P. Romney can't call Santorum unelectable (which he is) without telling large swaths of his party that agreeing with some of their most important issues makes a person unelectable. Besides, Americans don't tend to like to see favorites hammer on likable underdogs.

Of course Romney still has a huge money advantage, and none of the recent victories for Santorum actually won him any delegates. Romney didn't really even try to win those votes. When he has put forth full effort in states, Romney has been able to do quite well. Of course, not trying in those states could have been a big blunder rather than a smart use of money (remember, no delegates were awarded), as now the not-Romney focus has shifted to the guy he can't beat on like a punching bag.

Romney did win the CPAC straw poll, and he's still the odds-on favorite. His primary rival is no longer an easy primary-time target though, which means he's going to have to win ugly.

Consumer Credit Jumped in December

Consumer credit was up—way up—in December:

Consumer credit expanded by $19 billion in December. That's far more than the $7 billion that was expected by economists.

Revolving consumer credit (credit cards) grew by $4.1 billion sequentially, and is basically flat from last year again (up barely).

This is very good news as we work towards ending the balance sheet recession. Nonrevolving credit was the big driver, as revolving credit (mostly credit cards) was flat as mentioned above.

If this larger-than-expected expansion was driven by revolving credit, it'd be easy to hand-wave it away as holiday gift spending. It wasn't. People generally don't play Santa by first taking out a personal loan from the bank.

Instead, longer-term credit fueled the rise. That reality, combined with the fact that it continues a trend, means that people more and more think they are able to take on bigger, more serious loans. Add on top of it the good jobs number from December (and even better jobs number from January), and it's looking like we just might be in the beginning of a real recovery.

It's certainly a fragile recovery, as bad policy from Washington or large shocks from Europe could torpedo it, but it's probably a recovery nonetheless. This is very good news.

The Ambiguity of Hope

Last week's January job report was largely good news on nearly every level. It wasn't unequivocally good news, but we're not going to get any just yet in this economy.

It surprises me that Republicans were so dour in response to it. Granted an improving economy hurts their ability to defeat President Obama in November, so you've got that backdrop to all the grousing.

However, Americans tend to be an optimistic bunch even in the bad times. Listening to morose politicians sound unhappy after a great jobs report is not what they like to hear, generally. I'm sure the part of the G.O.P. base that is dead-set against the president nodded right along, but they're not going to vote to reelect the incumbent anyway.

It's especially surprising to me given that the current conditions allow for a really easy positive spin for the Republicans. The reason is because they have successfully blocked a lot of the president's agenda for the past year or so.

The Obama administration will no doubt claim that the president should be reelected because, despite the opposition, he's led the country towards more job growth. The converse could be easily argued, though. They could argue that the economic improvements stem directly from that opposition by Republicans. In other words, we'd be worse off if they let the president have his way. I don't think any actual numbers would bear that out, but politics has never been known for a strict adherence to the facts.

The Democrats tried to damage the G.O.P. by branding it "the party of no", but that's something Republicans have embraced to a degree by continuing to denounce the president and stall his agenda. It worked for them leading up to the 2010 election for sure.

What they're in danger of becoming, however, is the party of Debbie Downer, the buzzkills who greet even good news with furrowed brows. Regular people probably aren't looking closely at these numbers just yet, nor have they made their final choices on the November election. The Republicans can keep doing this now.

However if the economy keeps improving and they don't change their tunes to capture some of the growing optimism, they'll really find reason to be unhappy on Election Day.